


Kingdom of Man

by Lassenby



Series: Dog's Paw [2]
Category: Borderlands
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-04 23:39:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 46,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3096836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lassenby/pseuds/Lassenby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brick's time in a Hyperion prison, a reunion, and a rise to power. Sequel to Paradise. (second Dog's Paw story)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fall of New Haven

The streets of New Haven were silent, smothered under a curtain of smoke and ash. Only the occasional rattle of gunfire and scream split the silence, or the  _thunk thunk thunk_  of loaders moving in the haze, sometimes close, sometimes distant. Brick tried not to wonder who the screams belonged to. Instead, he focused on the tiny hand in his. He took a few steps down the street but was tugged gently back.

"We gotta go, Teeny," he said.

"Where's Dusty?" Tina asked.

Brick didn't know the answer. He couldn't stop to look for Dusty, couldn't risk the life of a human girl for a dog, not even a dog he loved, not even the the most adorable, wriggling, yapping brown scrap of a pup he'd ever known. He squeezed Tina's hand tighter, feeling the half moons of her nails bite into his palm.

"He's okay. He got out," Brick said. "He's waitin outside for us."

"Yeah?" She sounded hopeful.

"If we get separated, go to the shipping crate. You know the one? Where I used to put Frank?" That had been almost a year ago, outside of some other New Haven- a town where the buildings had not been transformed into pyres.

Tina shook her head violently, hair flopping. "No! I wont! I wont go this time!"

"Teeny, I swear, it wont be like last time," he lied, even as the metallic song of loaders clanged through the streets.

One of the loaders crashed by and Brick hugged the young girl into an alley, shielding her with his body. It didn't spot them.

"No, no, NO!" Tina shrieked.

"Knock it off," Brick hissed.

The girl ignored him. She was ten years old, apparently not too old to throw a tantrum. A shadow uncoiled from the alley and struck Tina across the face faster than Brick could react. The shadow turned out to be Kindle, her eyes blazing.

"Shut up," she demanded.

Tina grinned. "Hey gurl," she said. "What up?"

Kindle looked like she might lash out again, but she closed her eyes instead. When she opened them, they had become dark, placid pools. "I been playing a new game. It's for big kids only, though. You're too little."

"Whaaaaaat? Tell me tell me tell me! You better tell me, or...or I'll pee! That's a poem, betch," Tina said.

Another loader crossed the mouth of the alley. The fire's light threw its long shadow across the three of them, and for a moment Kindle didn't reply, only waited for it to move out of earshot. Then she whispered.

"Okay, but you can't tell anyone else. You gotta go straight where I tell you. Don't stop, or I'll think you told someone about the game, and I wont be your friend anymore. Okay?" Kindle said.

"Kay!" Tina said.

"It's too secret to tell you here. I'll meet you at the shipping crate, and then we'll play."

Brick almost interrupted to say that they didn't have time for this, but Tina tugged his hand.

"You heard the lady! Let's go, Big," she said.

When Tina turned away from her, Kindle frowned and shot Brick a pointed look.  _Your turn_.

"You comin with?" He asked. She shook her head.

"I'm gonna take the long way around. I'll meet you," Kindle said. She disappeared back into the shadows, leaving Brick and Tina alone.

Brick went to the mouth of the alley and peered around the corner, one way, then the other. Nobody stirred. Smoke as thick as drapes hung in the air, making it impossible to see further than a dozen yards in any direction, but it seemed safe to emerge. He turned back to Tina.

The girl was gone. He looked around and spotted her skipping in the opposite direction down the road.

"Teeny!" he called.

She looked back and flashed him a grin. "Move your buns, hon!"

The ground shook. A loader loomed through the veil of smoke ahead of Tina, parting the smog like a knife. It glared down at them with one baleful red eye. The muzzles of its shoulder mounted cannons glowed, emitting a high pitched whine as they powered up.

"Behind you!" Brick yelled.

Tina whipped around and yelped. She leaped out of the loader's warpath like a dancer, skiping, whirling, while rockets shattered the ground where she'd stood. She hurried to Brick's side. She reached out, and he thought she was trying to hold his hand again, but instead she snatched a grenade off his belt.

"Hey, don-"

"Yoink!" she said, and swiped his revolver out of its holster as well. She ducked around Brick's clumsy attempts to stop her. "Roland's been teaching me."

To demonstrate, she ripped out the grenade's pin and threw it at the loader. The grenade clunked off its shell and exploded when it hit the ground, stripping the paint from the loader's legs but not halting its approach. Brick had already retrieved his Double Anarchy SMG and began firing into the loader's hull. It ate the bullets and still didn't slow, didn't stop- only raised its miniguns.

"Get outta here, go to the crate," Brick shouted as the loader opened fire. His energy shield wobbled under the onslaught. Instead of retreating, he lurched forward.

"Nag, nag, nag," Tina replied. She fired the revolver at the loader's optic sensor, but missed.

Brick darted through the loader's legs as his shield depleted. The energy net bleeped, quivered, and collapsed into a neon green nova burst. Tina oohed and ahhed as the corrosive spray coated the loader and began to eat away the metal. One of the its legs buckled. Brick sprang away as it collapsed.

Tina skipped over to the incapacitated robot, raised the revolver, and delivered a bullet into its optic sensor. A wavering SOS hologram projected from its dead eye and reflected across her face. Another shot made the hologram flicker out.

Brick could hear other loaders grinding somewhere in the smoke. Tina grinned up at him, and he couldn't help but smile back. The girl looked like a murderous doll.

"You're crazy," he said.

"You pretty cray-cray yourself, Big."

"Let's go. But if we see another big motha like this one..." Brick raised his arm, his thumb up and forefinger stuck out in the shape of a gun. "You blow 'em away. Got it?"

Tina jumped up and down with excitement. "A'ight!"

She held his hand as they hurried through the decimated town. Occasionally they passed familiar bodies, people they'd known, and Brick hoped the girl wouldn't look. She hummed a song, seemingly oblivious to the carnage around her.

Something tiny streaked out of the haze; a brown ball of fluff with a flapping pink tongue, and Brick laughed out loud with relief. He let go of Tina's hand and held his arms out, low, so Dusty could leap into his embrace. The pup licked his face and Brick's heart felt suddenly too big for his chest. To find his dog in this mess...!

Dusty wriggled free and bounded a short way down the street. Tina skipped after him, laughing.

Someone staggered out of the smoke a dozen yards away, in the direction the pup had come from. It was Andy. Roland lagged behind him, clutching his midsection. Brick saw blood through the man's fingers. The shield emitter on his hip was dark, its radial face shattered.

"Oh good," Andy wheezed. "Brick, sir, I think we should go. I saw-"

A loader slammed into the ground between them. It made a staccato, mechanical clacking. After a moment, Brick realized that it wasn't clacking at all, but laughing.  _Wilhelm._

The cyborg commander grabbed Andy by the neck and hoisted him off the ground. Tina picked up Dusty, then dissolved into an alleyway. Wilhelm didn't notice her. Brick and Roland surged forward, but something in the smoke caught Roland from behind and pulled him back.

The figure stepped out of the smog, their silhouette resolving into a female form. Startled, Brick hesitated when he saw who it was. Nisha the Lawbringer caught Roland off-guard and clamped energy shackles around his wrists.

Wilhelm turned his mechanical eye on Brick. It flashed, hellfire bright in the gloom. A blue and gray drone swept down between them, bleeped, and unfurled an energy shield across the road. The fractals glowed like dragonfly wings before turning invisible.

Brick slammed into the shield and was sent staggering back. His skin crackled with discharged energy. He and Roland helplessly watched as the the Hyperion commander held Andy above the ground.

"Roland, help!" Andy squealed.

Wilhelm clucked. "Help yourself."

He let go of the struggling Raider. Andy stumbled, nearly fell, and tried to run to Roland, but before he could reach him, Wilhelm kicked him in the back, sending him sprawling face first onto the ground. Wilhelm's robotic laugh echoed through the street. He picked the young Raider back up by the hem of his shirt, scruffing him like a dog.

Brick heard the boy's sobs, but his view was obscured by the shield rippling as he slammed into it again and again, throwing his whole weight against the barrier.

"It's no wonder you cant take care of yourself, kid. Look at that baby face!" Wilhelm boomed. "You look fresh out of your momma's cunt. You got no scars, no weight. Look at me, kid. Stop crying." He slapped Andy across the face.

Roland kicked back against Nisha. She was distracted, listening to Wilhelm with a contemptuous sneer, and he managed to catch her a hard kick to the shin. She dropped him. Roland scrambled forward, arms still cuffed behind his back. Wilhelm snapped his fingers without looking up. A large red and gray drone loomed out the sky.

"Wolf,  _fass_ ," he commanded. The drone sent out a beam that hit Roland and exploded into a blue starbust. His mouth dropped open, full of blue light, and he uttered a strangled scream. Wolf held the beam on the Raider commander, fixing him to the spot.

Tina darted out of the darkness with Brick's pistol raised. She shot at the drone, her narrow arm jerked by the force of the recoil. The beam ceased and Roland collapsed to the ground. Wolf turned its eye toward the new opponent.

"Come and get me, you-" Tina said, followed by a slew of words that a ten year old no business knowing.

Nisha chuckled and made no effort to intervene.

"Damnit, Teeny!" Brick yelled. Wilhelm gave a barely perceptible barely nod; It was all the permission Wolf needed.

The drone fired a beam, but Tina jinked out of the way. She ducked and dodged, leading Wolf down the street. They vanished into the smog.

Brick waited for her scream, but it didn't come.

He'd been pounding on the smaller drone's energy shield with his fists. His knuckles were bloody, his shoulders bruised from ramming against it. Now he drew his Double Anarchy, and SMG capable of belching a metric fuckton of bullets in a brief burst. He emptied its entire clip into the shield. Nothing. No low-charge alert, no crackle of dissipation. Brick threw the gun down in frustration.

Across the barrier, Wilhelm dragged Andy over to where Roland lay in a crumpled heap and kicked the commander. Roland coughed up blood, tried to raise himself to his elbows, but Wilhelm stepped on his back and forced him down. Andy wailed.

"Dry up," Nisha snapped. She stood nearby, arms folded across her chest. "You're an unlikable little shit, you know that?"

Wilhelm chuckled. He dug his foot under Roland's chest and flipped him onto his back, then pinned him again, resting an elbow on his bent knee. He adjusted his grip on Andy- grabbed him around the back of the head with one huge robotic hand- and held him out to Roland.

"What about you? You like him?" Roland tried to answer, but Wilhelm stomped his stomach, driving the air out of him. "I didn't think so."

He squeezed. Andy's skull imploded in a rosebud of gore, and his body went slack. Wilhelm dropped the corpse onto Roland. Roland tried to wriggle away, but he was trapped. Andy's ruined head lolled to one side, bent out any identifiable shape.

"Heavy?" Wilhelm taunted. "It'll make you stronger, if you live. But I don't think-"

A brown ball of fur streaked toward the cyborg commander and lunged at his foot, yapping and biting.

Brick went ballistic. He didn't know why the sight of his dog would wake his animal now, after it slept through the cyborg crushing the life out of a human being, a human being who'd considered him a friend, but it didn't matter. His animal snapped awake, at last, and surged through him with a sick, winding heat.

Nisha strolled forward and reached down to the pup.

Brick's animal coiled around him, filling his vision with its endless piebald side. It pinched out his consciousness like fingers extinguishing a flame.

* * *

When awareness flooded back, it was over. The pup's lifeless body lay in the street. Dusty had been a runt, just a skinny little scrap of mutt, and looked even smaller dead.

Brick sobbed. He'd been screaming a moment ago, raging at the Hyperion commanders, had been for awhile. His throat ached. Searing pain cut ribbons across his forearms and chest where blazing bands of energy tethered him in place. He strained against them, blistering his flesh. Nisha kicked Dusty's body aside.

Brick wept openly as she strolled up to him. A smirk played across her lips, and he imagined tearing her throat out with his teeth. If she would take just one more step forward...but she stopped just short, and studied him.

"I wouldn't have requested this job if I'd known you guys were going to be such big babies. But I wanted to see my big, beautiful idealist again." She tried to pat his cheek, but he snapped at her. She laughed.

"I like a boy with teeth.  _God_ ," she breathed, looking him up and down with an appreciative leer. "I wish I could keep you. But I don't think my Jackie would like that. He doesn't play well with others."

She grabbed his crotch. He was helpless to stop her with his arms bound behind his back, tethered to something he couldn't see. His stomach rolled.

"Fuck...off..." he rasped.

"What's that? Fuck you? I'd be obliged." Her thumb made small circles over his groin.

"I'll k-kill you," he stuttered. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He hated those tears, hated her, hated himself for letting her live. If he'd only killed her when he had the chance... "I'll gouge your eyes out. I'll..."

"Nisha, what the fuck are you doing? Get off that bandit's dick," Wilhelm said, as he came around the corner. He smoked a cigar, and his arms were red to the elbow with blood.

The Lawbringer rolled her eyes but stepped away, leaving Brick to slouch against the loader's electric bonds.

Dusty was dead; Brick had basically killed the pup himself by letting Nisha escape in that pit. Tina and Roland might be dead too. He hadn't seen either of them after his animal departed. This seemed like a different street, but Brick couldn't remember how they'd gotten there. He wondered what Dusty had gone through before Nisha killed him. He banished the thought. He didn't really want to know. His animal, deep in refractory slumber, had saved him from that knowledge.

He tried to remember if Mordecai had been in town when Hyperion attacked. They hadn't been close for nearly a year, since Brick found out about Mordecai and Roland plotting to take down the Lawbringer behind his back. They'd become tentatively friendly again, but then Mordecai started dating Moxxi, and Brick had hated it. He couldn't stand to be around them.

So Brick didn't know where Mordecai was that morning, but he prayed that he'd been out of town.

"Boss says to load this one up too," Wilhelm said, gesturing toward Brick. "He's going to the Fathoms."

Nisha frowned. "Why so far?"

"Dunno. You're fucking your way to the top, why don't you ask?" Wilhelm said, strolling up beside Nisha.

She turned on a heel and slapped him, sending ripples across his energy shield. He laughed.

"I can't stand you," she seethed.

The cyborg commander plucked the cigar out of his mouth and ground it against Brick's shoulder. That hurt like a sonofabitch, even more than the energy tethers. The smell of burning flesh mixed with the rest of the smoldering town.

Brick hissed. His animal's abrupt withdrawal had shocked him, turned him inward, but now he looked around with renewed clarity. He glared up at the Hyperion commanders.

"You...You poor fucks. You sons of bitches. Do you even know what you stepped in?" Brick snarled. His rumbling tone, usually so much like his dad's, sounded different to his own ears- his consonants more clipped, his vowels pregnant- full of his momma's drawl.

"You fuckin' stepped in it. The Raiders'll find you, they'll kill you. They wanted to do it before. I shoulda let 'em, shoulda done it myself, with my bare hands. Crushed the life outta you, squeezed your throat til-"

"Oh yeah, baby? Tell me about it," Nisha purred. Her fingers grazed his chest.

"Get your Goddamn hands off me, bitch," he spat. He could only make it worse, but was unable to stop. "When Mordecai finds me, he'll-"

"Mmm, you gonna sic your boyfriend on me? I'd like that. Both of you..."

Wilhelm grumbled. "I can't take any more of this."

Brick saw the cyborg look at something over his shoulder, presumably the loader which held him. His cybernetic eye flashed.

Pain bellowed through Brick's body. His eyes snapped shut, and he could see the veins in his eyelids, the blood boiling inside them. It was like the electricity when his animal took over, but instead of invigorating, it was agonizing. Darkness swamped him.

In the blackness, twin witch-fires danced. Mordecai stood with his hands on his hip, impatience creasing the lines around his mouth and eyes. Brick reached for him, but he flew apart at his touch.

Distant pain thundered through his veins.

A million miles away, he heard Nisha's voice.  _Wow. He's still conscious, I think. That's amazing. I wonder if-_

He passed out.


	2. Girls

Brick woke up. He dragged himself into a sitting position, blinked around at his dimly lit surroundings, and found himself in a prison cell. He couldn't be sure, but he thought he recognized it. Maybe not the specific cell, but the bars, the bunks... _t_ _he Fathoms._  All prisons looked similar, with their bare-bones furnishings and monotone color palettes, but Brick could swear he was the jail where he'd rescued Athena over a year ago: the Lockdown Palace.

Someone had hauled Brick's unconscious body into the cell and unceremoniously dumped him on the floor. His head throbbed.

Images swam up through the confusion, dog-eared memories of the Fathoms that he'd run mental fingers over a hundred times. Speeding across the desert in his old truck, blowing away bandits left and right. The bowl of stars over a dry lake-bed. Mordecai's bare, sweaty back, loose dreads spilling over his shoulders, Brick's fingers gripping his hips. Bloodwing plummeting out of the clear blue sky to distract a drifter.

A brown heap on the ground. Dusty.

Everything flooded back, and Brick jumped up. When he found nobody else in the cell, he paced over to the bars and peered out. Nobody in sight: just an empty corridor with more cells on the other side. He spotted somebody lying in the bunks across the hall, apparently sleeping. From where Brick stood, all he could see was a greasy crop of white hair and the suggestion of a beard. It might have been Bool.

"Hey," Brick called.

The other prisoner lay motionless, so Brick sighed and stepped back from the bars. He scanned his cell. It was small, but he'd seen smaller. He noticed with a sinking feeling that there were four beds: two cots on either side, stacked. That would probably mean cellmates. There was a toilet. Aside from bare concrete walls, that was it. If Brick remembered correctly, most of the prison was underground, carved into a plateau, so of course there was no window. He hoped to escape before he could miss daylight.

Distracted by his evaluation of the cell, he didn't hear the door clang open at the end of the block. He did, however, take notice of bickering voices. Girls' voices.

"Boom! You see them exposed girders back there? Sloppy! I could put some bombs on those and blow this place to the moo-"

"Tina! It-quay aking-may ans-play in ont-fray of the ard-gay."

"Snoplay opee loopa! Poopee doo-day!"

There was silence while the other girl puzzled it over. "...Huh?"

"What'd I say? Was it something sexy?"

The other voice groaned, and an adult man laughed. Brick stepped up to the bars again and strained to look down the hall.

Two young girls, one pale skinned, the other dark, walked ahead of a Hyperion guard. They weren't shackled, though Brick supposed they couldn't get far if they tried to run. They wore matching outfits, too large yellow shorts and white tanktops, probably what served as undershirts for the regular prisoners.

"Big!" Tina cried when she saw him. She flung herself at the cell, and Brick hugged her through the bars. Kindle remained by the guard.

"You bastard. You welched on our deal. I didn't see you guys out at the crate, so I had to come back for you. Now look at me." She gestured down at herself. "I think these are men's underwear."

"They suit you," he said, then glanced up at the guard. He tried to pull away, but Tina clung to him tightly. "Why'd you bring kids to a place like this?"

"Wasn't my decision. Orders from the top," the guard said. He was a young man, full-faced and stubbly, with sleepy eyes that didn't meet Brick's while he talked.

"I bit him!" Tina said gleefully. "I bit Jack! He was gonna kill me, but the lady told him to put us with you instead."

"Why?" Brick asked.

Kindle answered instead. "She said it'd be funny. That you'd want to keep us safe, and it'd kill you, 'cause..." She looked away and shrugged. "Because you couldn't. But don't worry. I can take care of myself."

"Step back, please. I don't want to use this," the guard said, his hand hovering over the stick strapped to his belt- some kind of shock baton. Brick wriggled out of Tina's grip and stepped away. He didn't want the girls to get hurt, and they almost certainly would if he tried to fight now. Later, it would be different. He'd kill every Hyperion cocksucker in the place if he could. He'd learned a hard lesson about mercy.

The guard unlocked the cell with a key rather than a card or a bioscan. He pushed the two girls in, pulled the door shut, and locked it behind them, then seemed to remember that he had something tucked under his arm.

He held up the bundle. "Clothes," he explained.

"Yeah?" Brick asked.

"Sorry, long day. They're for you. I have to take what you're wearing."

He stuck the bundle of clothes against the bars and Tina grabbed them, pulled them through a piece at a time, and handed them to Brick. He gathered the clothes in one arm and gestured with the other, twirling his finger in the universal signal for 'turn around'. The girls obeyed, although Tina peeked back over his shoulder once. He stuck his tongue out at her, and she giggled before glancing away.

The guard didn't turn around. Brick wasn't surprised; That would be policy. He did notice, with some amusement, that the guard was blushing. He seemed very young.

Brick stripped out of his clothes. Whoever dragged him into the cell had already removed his belt, rings and boots, but now he relinquished his pants and sleeveless shirt as well. He'd not been wearing underwear, rarely did, and he quickly pulled on the provided briefs. He put on the undershirt, which was indeed what the girls wore, although his was considerably larger. Lastly, he stepped into the jumpsuit, but only hitched it up to his waist. He knotted the sleeves above his hips.

"Okay, I'm dressed," he said, thrusting his old clothes through the bars and into the guards waiting hands. The young guard was sloppy. Brick could have grabbed him and broken his arm, but he didn't. Instead he passed over the garments and stepped away, placing a hand on Tina's shoulder. She rested her cheek against his knuckles. "That it?"

"Yeah," the guard said. He paused. "Sorry about this. I don't...I wouldn't...never mind. That's all," he stammered, before walking away in the direction he'd come from. Kindle flipped him the bird as he disappeared from view.

When the door at the end of the hallway banged shut, both girls looked up at Brick.

"Alright, Big. Let's get cracking on the break out," Kindle asked, using Tina's nickname for him.

He snorted. "We? You can go with me, but I ain't lookin for no partners."

"You need us! No offense, but you're an idiot. I remember this one time when you threatened a helpless child in front of your boss," she said.

"I don't recall the kid being so helpless," Brick said.

"Come on! We'll be ancient by the time you figure something out." Kindle clambered up to one of the top bunks and peered down over the side. In the dim cell, lit only by the grubby florescent fixtures in the hall, her amber eyes glowed like a cat's. "But I can help you. I got mad stealth."

Tina bounced on the lower bunk. "She does! She came out of nowhere in New Haven, out of the smoke. She almost saved me."

"Almost," Brick said.

"I won't mess up this time," Kindle said, with a certainty that Brick envied.

"Put a sock in it, kid." He sighed and stretched out on the other lower bunk. He suddenly realized how much his skin hurt where the energy coils scalded him. He raised a forearm and studied the burns, wincing when he saw the welts. They'd turned deep red and purple, and had begun to ooze.

"I'll tell you about the necklace," Kindle said.

Brick sat up so fast that he banged his head against the empty bunk and fell back down on his pillow. His hand reached automatically for the necklace. But he had just changed clothes, so he knew he wouldn't find it. That necklace had been a heavy burden to lug around, but he needed it. Each trinket was a reminder of something he couldn't afford to forget, something he couldn't let his animal hide away from him. Without it, he felt unmoored.

"Big?" Tina asked.

"The necklace..." Brick said, trying to sound composed. "You said you didn't know nothin about it."

"I lied," Kindle said.

"What do you know?" Brick asked.

Kindle tsked. "Not 'til you swear to let us help."

"I'm bigger than you, kid. I'll drag it outta you with my fists."

"You're not a brute," she said, just as matter-of-factly as she'd confessed to lying, as if she knew him as anything besides a man who'd tried to steal her dead mother's necklace. But she was right. Brick didn't mind hurting people, but never animals or kids. In fact, he intended to play right into Nisha's expectations and do everything he could to keep the girls safe.

"You don't know that," he argued.

"Don't worry, he won't hurt you. He's really a shmoopy baby. A big, dopey, doofy, harmless-" Tina said.

"That's enough, Teeny," Brick growled. He covered his eyes with the back of his arm.

Keeping the girls safe would be hard enough without them poking their noses into trouble. Still, they were both orphans of Pandora, which made them more cunning and resilient than other children their age. They might actually be helpful. And if Kindle wasn't lying, if she knew anything about the origin of the key, it could lead him to Amanda. Brick sighed.

"Fine," he said.

"Alright! Let's shake on it."

Brick heard a  _shpt_  sound. He looked over to see Kindle leaning out of her bunk, hand outstretched, saliva glistening in her palm. Tina cheerfully spit in her own hand and reached up to shake with the other girl. Kindle left her hand hanging in midair, grinning at Brick expectantly.

He hesitated, then followed Tina's lead. His much larger fist completely enfolded the young girl's. It reminded him of the way he used to seal promises with Amanda, when they'd been young and happy, or mostly happy, because at least they had each other.

"We're a team now," Kindle said, rolling the word 'team' over her tongue reverently. "We got each other's backs."

"Gurl, I got your back. I got your butt too," Tina said, and groped at Kindle on the top bunk. The older girl swatted her away, laughing.

"Since we're pals now, you gonna tell me about the key?" Brick asked.

"Not yet. I need you motivated."

Brick almost argued, but suddenly he felt tired, too weary to fight about it. The wounds around his arms and back burned. They stuck to the scratchy sheets when he shifted, making him cringe. He would have to wash them, maybe have them checked out in the infirmary, but he couldn't worry about that now.

Exhaustion tugged at him, picking and pulling him down, like the curious mouths of small fish. He closed his eyes. He heard the girls chatting, but couldn't focus on the words.

Their voices lulled him to sleep.


	3. The Garden

Brick stared up at the painting. His eyes fixed on the Garden, the Garden of Earthly Delights, smack in the center of the triptych. He had to crane his neck a long ways to see it, and realized that he had turned back into a child.

"You aren't looking at those naked people in the Garden, are you?" His momma asked, peering down at him with a suspicious brow raised.

He shook his head, no. He dimly understood what she meant- in the vague way that children were always aware of sex- and it embarrassed him. His face, already flushed by the heat belching woodstove, turned an even deeper shade of crimson.

"Liar," his momma said, the corner of her lip turning up in an amalgamation of a sneer and a smile. She ruffled his hair. "I saw you lookin'."

* * *

Brick, now an adult again, stood in a meadow. He knew it at once: the Garden.

Naked people played in the fields and lakes, all milky limbs and laughter, their voices tinkling like bells. Some rode animals, some rode each other, and they all looked gloriously happy. A nearby group investigated the inside of an enormous broken egg. Another ring of people huddled around a large fruit, worshiping it with greedy touches and hungry, red-ringed mouths. On closer inspection, Brick saw that the fruit was actually a beating heart.

He stumbled backward. The sensation of sliding came over him, but he bore down to keep his footing. Somehow he knew that if he didn't, he would be pitched into the past again.

One of the figures turned away from the heart to look at him. Its eyes were utterly human until they blinked, and when they opened, they had turned into lidded, silver disks...twin half-moons.

"Slip," it said. Although the being sat some distance away, its voice came from right beside Brick's ear, murmured into it like a lover. "The curve, son. Can you see the curve?"

Brick tried to argue with it, but his mouth didn't work.

"Slip."

He did.

* * *

A boy stood on Brick's doorstep, holding a plate of cookies thrust out in front of him like a ward against evil spirits. The cookies looked like the good kind, maybe chocolate chip. They bulged against the plastic wrap.

"My ma made these for your family," he said.

"That's nice of her," Brick said, and took the plate.

"Not really. She only did it 'cos your ma hasn't, and it's her way of letting her know she's disappointed. She thinks everyone should kiss ass with new neighbors. I'm Emmett, by the way."

"Oh." Brick said, and nothing else. He was silently furious at himself, at the deep blush that started across his chest and crept up his collarbone, and at his mouth which refused to produce any more words.

Mercifully, Emmett broke the silence. "I better go. I'm 'sposed to hurry back, and I stopped to take a piss already," he explained. "I missed your name."

"Maurice," he said, shocked to hear his real name fall out of his mouth. He never used it. Something about this freckled stranger's smile made it hard to think. "But everyone calls me Brick," he added quickly.

"Good to meet you, Brick." Emmett tipped up his frayed baseball cap. A mop of blond hair tumbled loose, and his ears popped free. Brick thought of that old cartoon, Dumbo, when the elephant sneezed and his huge ears flopped out from behind his back.

Brick laughed before he could stop himself. "Sorry," he said. "I was thinkin about something else."

Emmett grinned from ear to giant ear. "Don't fib. I know what you're looking at." He twitched his ears. Brick had never seen anyone do that before, and another laugh escaped him.

"That's amazing," he said.

"You think? You should see what I can do with my dick, then," Emmett joked obscenely.

At least, Brick was pretty sure it was a joke. His cheeks burned. "Uh..."

Emmett had already started down the steps but he turned around to look back at Brick. "If you wanna hang sometime, I'm your new neighbor. You know where that drunk bastard used to live, down the road a piece?"

Brick nodded.

"That was my uncle." He paused. "I better warn you. You might have to help with chores if you come by. We moved in two weeks ago, and the place still ain't clean."

"That's okay. It sounds fun," Brick said.

Emmett shrugged. "It's not, but it might be more fun with you. So I'll see you sometime?"

"Yeah," Brick said. He heard his momma's footsteps in the kitchen and he ducked inside, shutting the door behind him. He didn't know why, but it seemed important that his momma not find out about Emmett.

But he did know. It was because of the way he felt after talking to the foul-mouthed boy; how his pulse thundered in his ears, how his thoughts returned to the exchange over and over, like a tongue to a chipped tooth.

For the first time ever, Brick heard the Garden calling.

* * *

Now it shimmered back into existence around him.

Brick found himself standing in a round pool. Nude women waded around him, each with a bird roosting in her hair. When they saw Brick, they clutched each other and pointed, and he realized that he was naked, too. He tried to cover himself, but the women flocked to him with gentle lust. They pried his hands away and kissed his lips, and ran their delicate fingers over his body. He closed his eyes.

"I can't," he said. "I'm..."

"Sick?" One of them asked. Her voice came out as a loon's mournful song, but he understood.

"...Gay."

She quacked her amusement. "Same thing, but that's alright. Look."

Brick didn't want to, but he opened his eyes.

Only one figure remained in the pool- a young man. Brick knew him at once. He recognized the constellation of freckles across the boy's nose, the ears that still stuck out too far from his head, and the crooked grin that made Brick's heart lurch painfully, even though he knew he was dreaming.

"Emmett?" he asked, as if he didn't know.

The young man didn't reply, but stepped closer to wrap his arms around Brick's waist.

Brick smelled the hay sticking out of Emmett's hair, could see every freckle on his shoulders.  _Impossible._ The green-eyed boy looked up. Brick bent to kiss him, aching all the way down to his bones.

When their lips met, Emmett suddenly had none. Only bare, gray teeth, his crooked grin transformed into a skull's grimace. Brick staggered back. The young man's skeleton collapsed into the pool, bone by bone, shattering the moon's reflection.

* * *

Brick and Emmett walked side by side down a dirt road, close enough that their knuckles brushed. Amanda whistled as she skipped ahead of them. Brick had recently taught her how, and she was making him regret it by constantly whistling the theme from that old movie, the Lawbringer. She gripped a plastic toy pistol in each hand.

"Your sister is cute," Emmett said, leaning against the fence when they stopped for Amanda to pet a neighbor's dog.

"Yeah, she's great," Brick agreed.

"I got an older sister. She lives in our old place. My folks think they kicked her out, but can you call it that if we're the ones who moved, and she's gotta send us money for food?"

Brick shrugged. "Why'd they kick her out?"

"She's got a girlfriend. Not a friend who's a girl, but the other kind."

"Like...gay?"

"Yeah," Emmett said, as though it wasn't damning evidence.

"That's cool," he said after a conspicuous pause. "My momma got kicked out of her house for marrying my daddy."

"Her folks are bigoted assholes too, huh?" Emmett asked.

Brick must have looked confused, because the other boy seemed embarrassed and cleared his throat.

"Uh...It was because your daddy is black, right?" he asked.

"N-no. I mean, I don't think so," Brick stammered.

"Aw, hell. I saw your daddy the other day, an I just guessed. It seems like a lot of folks around here are...never mind. Sorry."

"Nah, it's fine. My momma was young, is all. She dropped outta school when she got pregnant with me. I guess her parents wanted somethin different."

Emmett snorted. "Don't they always?"

A breeze swept by and cut the oppressive summer heat, pleasantly chilling the sweat on Brick's neck. The dry grass rattled behind them. It was high summer, brushfire weather. Frogs bleated lethargically from their hiding places.

Brick stared at the dusty ground, at his own bare feet beside Emmett's busted up sneakers. It occurred to him that both of their families were poor. Brick rarely thought about money, because nobody in their small farming town had enough of it to bother.

He hadn't noticed the other kids coming down the road. Now he heard their voices and boisterous laughter- harsh, like a pack of barking dogs- and looked up.

"Hey, it's Brick," one boy said.

Brick wanted to get away, but there was nowhere to go on the singular stretch of dirt road. The group of boys would have to go by them.

"Friends?" Emmett asked.

Brick shook his head.

A tall boy sauntered up to them, hands stuffed in his pockets. "Ain't seen you in awhile, Brick. You been staying home, servicing your ma? Nah. You'd be taking care of your daddy's cock, right?" He crowed a laugh at his own joke, and the other kids cackled along with him.

Brick's face burned, and he knew he'd be bright red. He wished, not for the first time, that he'd inherited more of his daddy's complexion, so he wouldn't show every blush so plainly. The sight of blood in his cheeks always seemed to rile his bullies worse, baited like sharks to chum.

Emmett scowled. "You think so? 'cos I saw him slippin' out your momma's window last night."

The tall boy snarled. "Emmett, right? I heard about your family. Heard about your sister, too." He formed a V with his fingers and waggled his tongue through the parted digits.

"Don't talk about my sister, you son of a-"

"Hey!" Amanda yelled, brandishing her twin pistols. She waved them menacingly. "Leave my brother an' his friend alone!"

Brick's heart leaped into his throat. He thought the boys wouldn't hurt a four-year old girl, but he remembered the frogs, and wasn't so sure. "I'm fine, Mandy. We were just talkin."

She remained unconvinced, her young face twisted by a scowl, her toy guns raised toward the bullies. Her eyes flicked between them. "Six o' you against us three. That ain't fair."

"Yeah?" the tall boy said, leering down at her. "More like two and a half."

"I can fight. I got my girls," she said, waving the guns. "You wanna duel, one on one?"

"Shoot, nah," the boy said, laughing. He looked at Brick. "I like your sister. She's not a yellow-bellied bitch like you. I ain't gonna start nothin in front of her, neither, so you're lucky."

He reached out, and Brick flinched, thinking that he was going to slug him after all. But the blow never came. Instead, the boy's hand rested on Brick's shoulder. The gesture might have been friendly some other time, from someone else, but it made Brick feel clammy and sick.

"Next time," the tall boy promised.

"You better bring more guys then, shit stain," Emmett retorted. Thankfully, the other boy didn't take the bait. He only shoved Brick back against the fence and stepped away.

Amanda holstered her pistols, glaring at the boy when he ruffled her hair on his way by. Brick lurched forward to grab her hand.

"Don't mess with those guys, okay? They're not nice." Brick said.

"I'll be fine," Amanda said. "I got the law on my side."

* * *

Something monstrous thumbed through Brick's mind. It flipped ahead.

* * *

Brick sneezed. The strong, seedy smell of hay made his head swim, and Emmett's constant chatter lulled him into a pleasant working rhythm. A shovelful at a time, he shifted hay from one side of the loft to the other. He hadn't been listening to Emmett for awhile.

"Maurice!"

Brick blinked. "What? Why'd you use my real name?"

"To get your attention, dummy. I was trying to tell you about the game last night. You said you missed it."

"I don't really watch baseball," Brick admitted.

Emmett sat up from the nest he'd built around himself. Although it was his family's barn, he'd stopped for a break nearly an hour ago and never resumed work. Instead he'd sprawled out in the hay and chatted with Brick- or chatted to him, anyway.

Brick didn't mind. He liked Emmett's voice.

"So you weren't listening?"

"Not really," Brick said, and grinned. He dropped the shovel. It clattered against the old boards, disturbing the birds in the barn's rafters. They flapped and bickered, and one of them shit, missing Brick by mere inches.

Emmett grinned back. "Come take a break with me."

Brick crossed the barn and flopped down in the hay beside his friend, close enough that his right knee touched Emmett's left. A strip of light fell through the window, across the floorboards and over the blond boy's legs and stomach. Brick saw his shirt riding up, revealing the faint suggestion of muscle around his navel.

He was about to look away, but a pale mark above the boy's hip caught his eye: a long, curved scar. Emmett noticed his gaze.

"I'm supposed to say I fell out of a tree," he explained, pulling his shirt down.

"You didn't?"

"No."

Brick touched one of his own scars, the deep nick in his forehead that ran along the hairline. His momma had carved it out with her wedding ring.

"Did you fall out of a tree, too?" Emmett asked.

"Yeah," Brick said. He laughed, even though it wasn't funny.

Emmett didn't say anything for a moment, just stared at him solemnly. It was the longest silence between them all day.

Brick was just about to break that silence when Emmett surged forward, eyes scrunched closed, and kissed him.

* * *

Brick stood alone, back in the Garden.

He recognized the absurd scene around him, knew it like the face of an old friend. The duck feeding berries to a prone person, the man pulling a bouquet of flowers out of another man's ass, and the two people copulating inside a clam-shell while another carried them on his back. Even the bewildering depravity of the Garden was a welcome change after being forced to relive the past. Even the good memories hurt.

 _Because I know what happens, B_ rick thought. He knew what would come next, and was desperate to avoid it.  _Please, not again._

The figures turned to him as if he'd spoken aloud. "Stay," they said, speaking all at once, their voices melding together. "Stay in the kingdom of man, and take your pleasures here."

"No. I gotta wake up now."

The figures parted, and Emmett stepped through them. He was alive again, and more naked than Brick had ever seen him. His bare skin seemed to glow.

"Come take a break with me," Emmett said. The voice was his alone, and it made Brick feel like crying.

"I can't."

"Why?"

Brick tried to remember. Two faces floated out of the darkness of his confusion- one light, the other dark. "The girls need me."

Emmett closed his eyes, and when they opened again, they had become silver moons. A titanic laugh rumbled through the Garden. It reminded Brick of the constructor's call, bellowing with a force that shook the ground, making him stumble.

One more time, he fell.

* * *

Brick's consciousness burst forth as his animal fled, leaving him exposed. He didn't know where he was. Steam filled his lungs, trying to warm him from the inside out, but wasn't able to. He shivered violently.

He opened his eyes and found himself in the shower. Alarm thrilled through him when he realized that the spigot had been turned, that the normally unused shower-head sprayed warm water over his naked, shuddering frame. They weren't allowed to use the shower. They couldn't afford it. Once a week his momma filled the tub and the family would take turns bathing, and Brick was always the last, after the water had gone murky and cold.

But now the shower spit warm water over his freezing skin, and it might have felt good if he wasn't so scared and confused. A coppery smell filled his nose. He finally saw the bottom of the tub, saw the blood rushing down the drain, slaking off him in sheets.

A startled squawk burst from him, and someone shifted outside the curtains.

"You're back," the person said. Brick could see a silhouette through the thin curtain, the straight posture and hooked nose, just like his own. It was his momma. "Thought the devil had you for good this time."

"What happened?" he asked, his own voice sounding distant in his ears.

"You really done it this time, baby. But I took care of everything. No one'll find out, even if they come looking. I made sure. I'm your momma, and you might belong to the devil, but it's my job to protect you," she said. Brick thought she sounded like she was trying to convince herself when she repeated, "It's my job."

"What, momma? What did I do?"

"You killed him. Killed that neighbor boy."

Brick remembered it instantly. Not all of it, not the parts after his animal took over, but about the argument with Emmett. He'd wanted Brick to run away with him, wanted to move in with his sister. As usual, he had been a stubborn, impulsive asshole. It was what Brick liked about him. What he  _usually_  liked about him.

But Brick hadn't wanted to go. As much as he hated some things in his life, he loved other parts. He loved playing gunslinger with his sister and working the farm with his daddy, and even loved his momma, the way every boy loves his mother, long after she'd given him enough reason not to. Long after she'd given him enough scars.

Now she gave him another one in that low, gentle voice. "I heard him screaming, and I came running, but Brick, baby...I was too late."

He looked down at the floor of the tub, at the blood, and his stomach flipped.

"No," he said.

But he believed her. He'd nearly killed before, but those had been the other boys, the bullies, and they'd lived. They'd always lived.

His momma pulled the curtain aside. He wasn't embarrassed to be naked in front of her. She must have stripped him, after all, and gotten him into the tub, and he was too upset to care anyways. He felt like a boy standing on the precipice of a yawning pit.

"Yes," she said. "I dragged him to the cellar. Nobody will find him."

Someone had bruised her eye, and Brick had a pretty good idea who. His knuckles felt raw. He'd been hurt in several places, wounds like burning brands under the water. An especially bad cut on across his lip was still bleeding, pulsing wells of crimson with every heartbeat.

"Did he fight?" he said, not knowing why he asked.

"Some. I think I hurt you worse, though. You didn't come easy."

Brick began to cry, enormous tears that rolled down his cheeks, and buried his face in his momma's shoulder, folding his arms around her. She returned the embrace and held him. Brick was dimly surprised that she allowed it.

"I'm sorry, momma."

"Shhh, baby. Shhh."

Brick wondered if Emmett would go to heaven. After years of staring at the painting in the kitchen, he wasn't even sure that he believed in a heaven. There was no panel depicting it: only Eden, the Garden and Hell. But for good people like Emmett, there had to be. He deserved to go somewhere good after what Brick had done to him.

"Can we pray?" he asked, mumbling the words against his momma's shoulder. "I wanna pray for Emmett."

"No. God doesn't want to hear about that boy." Her words, which had been so soft, suddenly turned hard. They rattled in Brick's ears like pitted stones. "He doesn't want to hear from you, either. I'd like Him to forget about you."

Brick was too sick and sad to argue. He would worry about it later; long nights he'd lay awake and think about Emmett, and wonder if he'd gone to some kind of better place, and if Brick might be able to glimpse him from his own spot in Hell. He'd even wonder, briefly, if he hadn't killed the boy at all. His momma might have done it herself, and it wouldn't be surprising.

But in his gut, he knew that she hadn't.

Someone was praying. His momma had told him not to, but he could hear it, faintly, over the hissing water. It seemed to come from miles away.

_Now I lay me down to sleep..._


	4. Both Parts

"I pray the Lord my soul to keep. His love to guard me through the night, and wake me with the morning's light," a voice whispered, rushing through the familiar prayer. The room was pitch black, but Brick recognized the voice as Kindle's.

"You got the words wrong, and you forgot to say Amen," he said.

Springs squeaked in the darkness. "I thought you were asleep," Kindle said.

"I was. You woke me up."

"No, no way. I was quiet."

"Take it from me, kid. If you don't want people to hear, you gotta be so quiet that God himself has to lean in to hear you."

"I don't care about that. I'm not embarrassed," she snapped. Then, curiosity piqued, she added, "Why do you know, anyway?"

"I pray too. I do the other one, though. The good one. And I say Amen."

"I was gonna, but you interrupted me. I do both parts."

"Both parts?"

Having already been caught, she finished the prayer more slowly. "If I should live another day, I pray the Lord to guide my way." She ended with 'Amen', which Brick whispered along with her. They were quiet for awhile. Brick began to wonder if she'd fallen asleep. He thought he heard two sets of snores. But, as if in answer to his thought, the snoring hitched into a high stutter before smoothing out again. It was only one voice, after all.

"Girl sleeps hard," Kindle said. "I was surprised she could sleep with..." She trailed off.

"With what?"

"You were talking. I almost woke you up, but I didn't wanna get my face mashed in if you freaked. It sounded like a bad dream. I, uh...I think you were crying." Brick tried to say something, but Kindle hurried on. "It's okay, though. I cry sometimes. I cried on the train here, after they took my necklace."

"Yeah, well...they took mine too. Listen, kid, are you sure you can't tell me about the key? It's important."

"Why?" she asked.

"I think it used to be my sister's. I left home a long time ago, and I guess she disappeared a year or two later," Brick said. A long time ago seemed like an understatement. It had been twelve years at least since he last set foot on Menoetius. "My dad only got to tellin me three years back, and he said I should try here. He'd heard something from someone, who heard from some other guy...hardly nothin to go on, but I was just doing merc jobs anyway, so..."

It sounded ridiculous, like he was grasping at straws. Less than straws- mere stalks of hay.

"Oh," Kindle said.

"So, will you tell me? About the necklace?"

"I gotta be honest, Big. I don't even remember my mom wearing it. It might not have even been hers, but it was the only thing the Lance gave me after she died, before they shipped me off to New Haven. I shouldn't have said..." She swallowed hard. "I didn't know."

"It's alright," Brick said. It had been a thin hope, anyway, as thin as the straws that led him to Pandora in the first place. Still.

"Your mom is dead, huh?" He'd suspected as much, but she'd never mentioned it before.

When Kindle spoke again, Brick could hear the swell of rage in her throat. "Her commander called it a friendly fire incident. Some idiot shot her in the back while they were fighting bandits, and I never even got to say goodbye. I just got that stupid key and an apology from the commander. I hate that. Like, why'd he have to apologize? It didn't fix anything."

"He was s'posed to keep her safe, and he didn't. He probably feels bad."

"Fuck that. He feels bad? I feel worse. He doesn't get to feel better just by saying sorry, if I don't even..." Kindle drew in a long, shaky inhalation, then breathed out. "Sorry. And sorry about your sister, too."

"Thanks."

They fell silent again, and this time Brick was sure when he heard a second set of snores join the first. He turned on his side, his shoulder nearly brushing the upper bunk in the narrow space, and tried to remember his dream. It had seemed so vivid before, but now it slipped through his fingers when he drew close, and all he could recall was Emmett's face...his eyes transformed into glassy moons.


	5. Hot Water

"Prisoner! You awake?"

Brick blinked, breaking the crust that had accumulated in the corners of his eyes during the night. The voice had roused him from a mercifully dreamless sleep.

"Whatchu want?" he mumbled.

"I can take you to shower now. I saw your burns last night, figured you'd want to wash them."

Brick sidled out of the bunk, careful not to hit his head again. "What about them?" he asked, nodding to the snoring kids.

"Let them sleep. They'll be fine here."

The concrete floor was freezing against Brick's bare feet as he crossed the cell. He stood by the bars and studied the guard with sleepy, unguarded curiosity. It was the same man who'd led the girls in the day before. He struck Brick as a sweet kid, someone who'd probably married his childhood sweetheart and had a couple kids of his own already. He stared up at Brick with apprehension tugging the corners of his mouth. But it must have taken courage to come here just to offer an early shower to a prisoner, knowing that kindness might be repaid by hostility. The young guard was either brave or dumb.

"You gonna cuff me?" Brick asked.

The guard unlocked the cell with unsteady fingers and shook his head. "No. They don't send the worst ones here, so security is more relaxed."

But Brick noticed that after pocketing the keys, the guard's hand never strayed far from the shock baton and radio on his belt. He led Brick down the hall, always keeping the prisoner a pace ahead.

"Are you the only guard for this block?" Brick asked.

"This, and the next one over. You and the girls are the only ones here right now, so that would be a pretty light detail." That surprised Brick, and he almost said so, but the guard kept talking. "They can shower later, by the way. I'll make sure nobody else is down there when I take them."

"I'll go too," Brick grunted.

"You can't, it's-"

"Those girls don't go nowhere without me."

The guard hesitated, then sighed. "Fine. I'll work it out. But you could have told me sooner. I would have told you to take your shower at the same time."

"I ain't gonna strip in front of Teeny. She'll gossip about my butt."

The guard laughed. "Well, if you ever need to ask for me, my name is Briggs."

"Wish I could say it was good to meet you, Briggs, but-" Brick shrugged.

The rest of the short walk to the showers passed in silence. For a Hyperion guard, Brick thought Briggs seemed okay. A little anxious, but honest. Sort of like Andy, if he'd had a spine.

 _He had a skull, though. We all saw it,_ Brick thought with a chill.

Briggs gestured to a large, open arch at the end of a hallway -  _after you_  - and Brick stepped into the room. The showers were full of warm, wet heat, and steam that rolled across the tile floor.  _Heated water_ , Brick thought, bemused. They hadn't even had that in New Haven. A few prisoners showered at the far end of the room, half hidden behind thick concrete pillars that stood at regular intervals. Shower heads and their accompanying knobs jutted from the columns.

Brick suddenly remembered the place. He thought he could even see where he'd killed Mr. Shank; could just make out the faint pink tint in the grout where the blood hadn't scrubbed away.

He hadn't wanted to murder the bandit lord. Brick had no problem with him, but business was business, and the centurion woman Shank's crew had captured would go on to give Mordecai and himself a lot of business. So they had cut Shank down mercilessly, and when the bandit's lover attacked them in a bereaved frenzy, they'd slaughtered him, too. That was business on Pandora.

Brick began to pull his undershirt over his head and glanced back at Briggs.

"You staying for the show?"

The guard surprised Brick by blushing. "No, no. Well, yes." He pointed to another yellow and white clad man who stood by the other door. "I'll be over there. You can come to me when you're done."

"No time limit?"

"Within reason."

"Whoah! These dumbasses have it good," Brick said with an appreciative whistle.

Briggs strolled off to join the other guard, and Brick turned back to the showers. The room was huge, so it would be easy to find a secluded place to wash. He finished stripping off his clothes and kicked them against the wall.

"C'mon, Rocko. I said I was sorry," said one of the other prisoners, a giant man, even bigger than Brick, what he and his friends would have dubbed a 'badass bruiser' before getting the hell into cover. Stacks of muscle packed so thickly that there didn't seem to be a human frame underneath, scars pitting the bulk of his flesh. Brick wasn't embarrassed to stare at the naked brute any more than he would be embarrassed to look at a pile of boulders.

The hulking man was talking to another prisoner, the one he'd called Rocko. Brick couldn't get a good look at him past the other man. The brute positioned himself to trap the smaller man against the pillar, and when Rocko tried to sidle away, he grabbed his shoulder with a hand the size of a hubcap.

"Go fuck yourself, doll," the shorter prisoner said, and sighed, like he'd been making the point for awhile but it hadn't penetrated the other man's thick skull yet.

"Why would I do that, when I got your pretty mouth right here?" The other said. He gripped Rocko's jaw with his free hand.

"Hey!" Brick yelled.

The bandit looked over his shoulder, one cro-magnus brow raised in disbelief. "'Scuse me?"

Brick puffed out his chest, trying to look like a more imposing figure, but found it hard to feel tough with his dick swinging free. "Leave him alone. He clearly ain't interested in you."

The brute looked down at the pinned prisoner, who shrugged.

"Well, I did tell you," said Rocko. He reached up and patted the big guy on the cheek. "I'm not the one you have to apologize to, anyway."

"No...'spose not," said the brute, grinding his toe against the floor like a guilty child on steroids.

"That's right. Now, get lost. Go kiss and make up," Rocko said, giving the behemoth a suggestive shove.

"Maybe we just make up, an' come back to you for kissing."

Rocko grinned. "Fine, fine. Just go!"

Brick realized with an embarrassed jolt that he was still standing there, slack jawed, watching the interaction between the two prisoners. The brute turned away from Rocko and shouldered Brick on his way past. Brick grimaced away from his breath, which stank like old meat.

He couldn't imagine how Rocko put up with that stench, since the two appeared to be intimate. The idea of the bruiser doing anything of that nature turned Brick's stomach. He wondered if other people would feel that way about himself and Mordecai, if they knew.

 _Knew what? That's been over for awhile, amigo. Finished. Done_ , he reminded himself, only it was Mordecai's voice in his head.

Then Brick looked at Rocko, and his stomach flipped for an entirely different reason.

The smaller man didn't resemble a pile of rocks, or any other geological formation- except, perhaps, the Garden incarnate. It wasn't exactly right to call Rocko 'smaller', because he wasn't small. He might have been a little taller than Mordecai if he'd been there to compare - and Brick compared every man to Mordecai, if he was honest - and was more muscular, with broader shoulders and thicker extremities. All the extremities, Brick couldn't help but notice, since the man stood with his hands on his hips, unapologetically nude. Tattoos banded his chest and arms, sea-glass green swirls against olive skin.

The man regarded Brick with a glitter of amusement in his dark eyes. Brick noticed, with a hard swallow, how veins in Rocko's forearms stuck out a little, and the smooth arc of his hips down to a dark thatch of hair, clean and perfect, like a man carved from stone.

Brick worried briefly over something his momma used to say-  _Don't go down to the Garden,_ she'd tell him, although she hadn't been talking about any real place. She'd meant it as a metaphor for sin, particularly lust. But that seemed very distant now, worlds away.

Here, Rocko was the embodiment of the Garden. Brick wanted him, wanted to go down to him _._

_Or on him..._

Rocko snapped his fingers, startling Brick out of his thoughts. "You okay? You're not one of the messed up ones, are you?"

"Huh?" Brick asked.

"You know, the bandits from out past the Divide."

Brick just gaped.

"Never mind. I can tell you're not. They don't really talk. Listen, though, do you need a medic? They're pretty stingy with kits around here, but I got some guys who owe me." Rocko glanced over at the guards, who'd stopped chatting to watch the exchange. Now they quickly turned back to their conversation. "Those burns look bad."

"They're nothin'," Brick said, although they felt almost as bad as they looked. "They just need washed."

Rocko waved him over. "C'mere, cutie. I won't bite. Do those go around your back?"

Brick nodded, wondering a little at the endearment. He'd been called a lot of things in his life - dummy, faggot, bastard, baboso - but cutie had never cracked the list.

"I'll help you wash, then. It was sweet of you to stick up for me. Unnecessary, but sweet," he said, and chuckled. His laugh was low and musical. It made Brick's heart skip a beat, made him step forward automatically. Rocko grabbed Brick's wrist and pulled him into the shower's spray.

Agony seized him when the water first flowed over his body. Although the rest of his skin assured him that the water was only lukewarm, it seemed to boil over the burns, scalding him anew. He buried his face in his hands and gritted his teeth, waiting for the pain to abate. He became dimly aware of something tickling his stomach.

He peeked through his fingers and saw Rocko thumbing a scar near his naval, the rest of his hand braced against abs.

"I'm Rocko, but, you probably heard that. What's your name?"

"It's, uh-" he almost said Maurice. "Brick. Uhm...What're you doin?"

"I thought that you might want something. You know, for defending me."

"From your boyfriend." Brick snorted. "Man, I'm an idiot." The pain ebbed while they talked, until the burns radiated an almost comfortable warmth instead of red-hot misery. His coiled muscles unwound. The other man's fingers brushing over his skin sent a pleasant shiver through him, a sensation he hadn't felt in a long time; pins and needles, slender daggers of lust.

"He's not my boyfriend." Rocko's said, while his fingers fluttered down over Brick's stomach, closer and closer to the area that, Brick realized with an embarrassed flex, betrayed his interest. His dick stood at half attention.

"What? I thought you-"

Rocko stopped pawing but continued to stand so close that Brick could feel heat coming off him in waves. "We fuck, sure. But I wouldn't call him my boyfriend. I fuck just about everyone." He glanced at the guards again, just a quick, sidelong look, but Brick noticed.

He was mortified. "Everyone?"

"If they behave. I've been here the longest, since before Hyperion. The prisoners here are mostly bandits from different clans. The guards give me special treatment to keep them from killing each other."

"How do you do that?" Brick asked.

The other man gave him a long, loaded look, and he blushed.

"Oh."

Rocko must have seen disapproval in his face, because he frowned. "Don't look at me that way. I happen to like sex. And it's better than..." He shook his head. He was touching Brick again, fingers tracing the hard line of his abs.

"I don't wanna take advantage," Brick said. "You don't, uh, you know. You don't hafta do that stuff for me."

"What if I want to?"

Again, Brick could only gape, and Rocko loosed another laugh. It might have been insulting if it weren't so damn breathy and beautiful. His fingers grazed one of the burns, making Brick jolt.

"Hey, Cash," Rocko called to the guards.

"What?"

"I forgot the soap. Would you bring it to me?"

The guard stamped over and thrust a white bar of soap into Rocko's outstretched hand.

"Thanks, gorgeous," Rocko said, and winked. The guard, Cash, muttered under his breath. Before stalking back to his post by the door, he laid a hard, open palmed smack across Rocko's bare ass.

Brick balked. "You and him, too?" he asked.

Rocko lathered the soap between his hands before replying. The suds smelled medicinally plain, like rubber gloves. Eventually he handed the bar to Brick and rubbed his hands across the larger man's broad chest, taking extra care around the burns.

"Yep," he said at last.

Brick had nearly forgotten that he asked a question. He grunted, immersed in the feeling of Rocko's hands on him, which now drifted up to massage his shoulders. He bent so the man could reach. Tension drained out of him as Rocko worked, kneading the muscles, drawing his nails gently across skin.

"You think I'm a slut," Rocko said.

Brick didn't know how to answer that, so he shrugged.

"Well. I guess I am, but at least I have a choice about it. That's better than I had in the Cauldron. You ever been out there, to the Highlands?" Rocko asked.

"Nah," Brick said.

"You look familiar, so I thought...Anyway. I used to run with the clan out there. Nice place, easy life. The old King used to love me. Not...not love. Nothing serious, but he liked my body, and I didn't mind. I liked it. Liked him."

He didn't say anything for awhile, so Brick asked, "How'd you end up here?"

"Goddamn mutiny. Bunch of shit-lickers killed the king, and those guys were always jealous of how he treated me. They...uh."

He paused for a long moment. His fingernails pressed harder now, nearly scratching, and it reminded Brick of Mordecai in one of his moods. It filled him with a kind of aching affection that made him want to wrap his arms around the ex-bandit. He didn't, though, and Rocko eventually continued.

"They used me," he said with a dismissive shrug. "When they got bored with me, they sold me to the warden here. That guy was alright."

"Mr. Shank?" Brick asked.

Rocko blinked. "I knew I recognized you! You're the one who killed him, right?"

Brick's mouth opened and closed wordlessly, but Rocko laughed. "It's okay! But I remember you. I wasn't much help when you came through. I saw you pop some punk's head off, and I thought, no thanks. I'm not getting mixed up in that. So I went back to bed."

"Good," Brick said. When Rocko looked confused, he added, "I'm glad I didn't kill you."

"What a coincidence! So am I. Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I might as well be a slut on my own terms, right? To get what I want."

Brick frowned. "Whaddya want from me?"

"Oh, nothing! It's not like that," Rocko said. "Well. One thing. I want you to like me."

"I do like you," Brick said. Rocko smiled up at him coyly, eyes half lidded, droplets of water clinging to his lashes, and Brick felt like a fourteen-year old boy with a crush again.

"I'm happy to hear that. But what I also need to know is...do you want me?" Rocko's hand dipped between Brick's legs, grasped with soapy fingers and found him hard. A single stroke made Brick so lightheaded that he panicked for a moment, thinking his animal was coming to the surface, taking control. When he realized the feeling was just pleasure, he almost laughed. It had been so long that he hadn't recognized it.

But he raised a staying hand to Rocko's chest. "I can't."

"Why not?"

 _Because you're a stranger that I just met in a prison shower_ , Brick thought.  _Because I've only had sex with one person before._

What actually came out of his mouth surprised him. "I was with someone awhile back, and we had a fight. We made up, kinda, and wanted to be friends again. But I...I couldn't," Brick said, stumbling over the words. He'd never told anyone about his relationship with Mordecai. The vocabulary was unfamiliar on his tongue. "He got with a girl while we weren't talking. I had to see 'em together, and it was too hard. I can't do it again."

"Can't be with someone else?"

"I can't..." Brick paused. "I can't share."

"Ah," Rocko said. When he withdrew his hand, Brick felt suddenly exposed in the open shower- more naked than naked. Despite the warm water, he shivered.

"It's nothin personal."

Rocko shrugged and plucked the soap out of Brick's palm. "I know. It's fine. Not to sound like a prick, but I'm used to everyone wanting me, and I forget that some people have scruples."

Brick didn't know what to say to that, either, so he just slicked back a fringe of Rocko's dark hair that had fallen into his face. Rocko clutched his chest like he'd been shot.

" _Il mio amore!_ My perfect gentleman," he said. "I'll get you eventually."

Brick didn't doubt it.

For the rest of the shower, Rocko was a gentleman, too. He helped Brick wash his back but stayed respectfully above the waist. Brick was relieved, but also strangely disappointed. They talked a little, mostly about the prison, a bit about the guards. Casual topics. Things that most people would lead a conversation with, rather than a declaration about fucking everyone and a story about being a bandit lord's sex slave.

When they finished showering and prepared to leave through separate exits, Brick cast a final look over to where the other man stood, and found him staring back. Rocko winked and blew a kiss.

More prisoners had trickled into the showers, and Brick had the crazy thought that one of them would catch the blown kiss before it reached him. Still, he mimed catching it and putting it in his pocket. He saw Rocko laugh, and was sorry that he couldn't hear it over the hiss of running water.

Brick remembered it later while he lay in his bunk. With his burns aching, and the snores of the girls keeping him awake, isolated by absolute darkness, he pulled the kiss out of his pocket and pressed it to his lips.


	6. Mess

Brick remembered the mess hall of the prison. It had looked different back then, wall to wall packed with ramshackle huts, bandit effigies, and lowlifes around every corner. That last part was the same, but now the scumbags were prisoners; sitting sedately in safe plastic chairs and wearing the yellow and white prison attire. They dutifully ate their bland food before filing back to their cells. Brick felt bad for them. The old Lockdown Palace had been a terrible place, but there had been a kind of beauty in it. He couldn't see anything beautiful about this sterile hive.

"I been here before, you know," he told the girls as they stood in line to receive food. "When it was a bandit camp. Had to fight my way through."

"Are you shitting me?" Kindle asked.

"Nope, no shittin. Bandits as far as you could see."

Tina slammed her tray down on the stainless steel counter. The woman serving food at the station jumped, then glared. "Brown stuff please! With green shizz on the side," Tina demanded. The woman rolled her eyes but scooped a steaming dollop of goop onto the tray.

"Brown stuff for me too," Brick said. "So, there we were, just me and Mordy and all these bandits were closin in around us. Oh, and Blood was there, of course. This super big, super bad weirdo had Mordy backed against a wall, right, swingin on him with his freaky huge mutant arm. Blood was raisin hell on a pack of midgets, so it was up to me. I-"

"Can I have both?" Tina asked, holding up two foil wrapped parcels. The serving woman shook her head. Tina stared hard at the packages, and then up at Brick. "Big? Wanna get this for me? Puh-lease please please! I'll share."

Brick plucked one of them from her hand and dropped it onto his tray. "Alright, but shut your trap. I'm tryin to regale you with my adventures right now."

"Woot!" Tina cried, and danced along the line.

"Where was I?" Brick said.

"Mordecai was trapped, and you had to save him," Kindle said.

"Yeah! HELL yeah. The badass psycho was closing in, and it was all up to me. So..." Brick paused for effect. "I punched him."

"...And?"

"And what? That's it! I punched his head clean off!" Brick boomed with laughter. Tina joined in, and they both whooped like hyenas, wiping tears from their eyes.

Kindle looked embarrassed and sidled away from them. "Urk," she grumbled.

They finished getting their food and crossed the room, searching for an empty table. Prisoners already filled most of the seats. They craned their heads to get a better view of the newcomers, especially Kindle and Tina. They looked the girls over, not bothering to hide their hungry stares. Brick overheard one of the prisoners tell another to 'get a whiff of that tail'. He whipped around, ready to pummel the guy, but Tina tugged his sleeve and pointed out a vacant table. Brick followed her to sit in one of the anchored seats.

"What a mouth-breather," Kindle remarked, jabbing a thumb toward the prisoner.

Tina hummed in agreement but didn't look up from what she was doing. She'd taken the packet off Brick's tray and unwrapped it. The contents were unidentifiable, grayish and lumpy, and Tina pushed them aside with a grimace.

"Why'd you want it, then?" Brick asked.

"Duh," Tina said, and held up the foil, twisting it this way and that, so it flashed in the light. "For this."

"Oh," Brick said, like he understood.

Kindle swiped the foil out of her hand and stuck in into the hem of her shorts, glancing around. "Be cool, Teeny," she hissed.

"Be easy, girl! I'm cool. Take this one too," Tina said, and tried to shove the other foil packet into Kindle's shorts.

"Wh- Godammit, get outta there!" she said, and pushed Tina away, laughing.

Brick scanned the room and spotted three guards. To his relief, none of them were watching their group. Little girls were not the most subtle conspirators.

"Should we-" Kindle said, then lowered her voice. "Should we talk about what we're gonna do? I can't stay here. This food is nasty."

Brick hadn't touched it yet, but it did look horrific. There were two mounds of two textured slop on his tray, gritty and smooth, ranging in color from gray to grayish-brown.

"I dunno. I haven't thought about it," he admitted.

"What? You haven't  _thought about it_?" Kindle said.

"Not yet."

Kindle groaned and laid her head on the table. "We're gonna be here forever."

"Listen, kid, I said I'd get us out, and I'm gonna. I just..." Brick trailed off.

He'd spotted someone through the throngs of prisoners. Rocko picked his way across the cafeteria toward the line, chatting with people as he passed. He leaned over to hear someone better, his dark hair falling across his eyes, and Brick admired his jumpsuit-clad butt. Rocko laughed at something the other prisoner said, barely audible over the crowd's rabble, and that low, beautiful chuckle sent Brick's stomach fluttering.

Kindle followed his gaze. "Who's that?"

"No-one," Brick said, looking away quickly.

"Oooooh," Tina said, a grin creeping across her face.

"What?"

"You like him."

"N-No!" Brick stammered.

"Cute guy and Big, sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G-" Tina chanted, bouncing in her seat.

A flash of red crossed Brick's vision, and he slammed his palms down on the table. Other prisoners glanced over. He ignored them. "Don't."

Tina didn't let up. "You should call him over. Make a move! Life is short."

"I ain't gonna do that, and don't you, either." But it was too late. Tina already stood on her chair, waving to be seen above the rabble.

"Hey mama! Walk this way!" she catcalled, and completed the awful spectacle by whistling. Kindle's hand flew to her mouth, stifling a laugh. Brick wished he could phase through the ground. There was no way that Rocko hadn't noticed.

But when a shadow fell over their table, it wasn't Rocko's. A mountainous man leaned over the group, his hubcap sized palms pressed against the table, regarding them with a separate leer in each piggy eye. It was the man from the showers.

 _Damn,_  Brick thought.  _They grow 'em big on Menoetius, but not this big. This is a blue ribbon winner._

"Didn't think I'd find you so easy," the prisoner said. His rancid breath rolled over Brick like a fog, and he cringed away. "Thought you'd make yerself scarce after this morning."

"Donno why I'd do that," Brick said, teeth gritted. "I got no problem with you."

"I ain't no homo, so I weren't about to pick a fight in the buff. But now that you got your clothes on-"

Brick didn't wait for the man to finish. The red flashed before his eyes again and he leaped out of his chair, fists bunched, and threw a hard jab into the other prisoner's nose.

The brute staggered back, caught off guard by the punch. His hands flew to his face. When he regained his balance and dropped his hands, they came away bloody.

"Mudder fugger," he said, whistling through the splintered, mangled mess of his nose.

He lunged toward Brick, his massive fist hurtling toward his face, but Brick ducked out of the way. He threw another jab into the brute's chin, making his teeth clack together audibly. He recovered quickly and slammed his fists into Brick's head, left and right in quick succession, sending him crashing into a nearby table.

A fist of darkness closed around him. Jagged shards of pain filtered through that black shroud, and Back grasped at them, desperate to stay conscious. Through reeling vision he saw other prisoners scatter. The bruiser kept coming, features twisted into a grimace.

Brick scrambled up, but the darkness throbbed over him again. He barely managed to find his feet before the brute reached him.

The prisoner landed a hard punch against Brick's jaw before he could lurch aside. Brick slid back down the side of the table, fumbling for the edge, slipping.

"Dun' worry," the brute slurred. "I'll take good care'a dem girls for you." He laughed, a phlegmy  _hurg-gug-gurg_. "I'll...Hey!"

This exclamation was directed at Kindle, who'd leaped up and slammed her tray across the brute's back, food and all, sending up a spray of gruel. The prisoner whipped around and smacked her across the cheek. She spun away, and Tina caught her before he hit the ground.

Brick's animal lurched up, grappling for control, but he fought it. If his mind was gone, there'd be nobody looking after the girls.  _You can't help them,_  his animal crooned.  _They don't need you. Just slip..._

But Brick was already up, rocketing forward on a second wind. He remembered something his daddy once said. It was after he'd gotten into a fight, and had done a number on the other kid's face.  _Gave him the ol' one-two, did ya?_  his daddy had asked. One two, one, two, Brick pounded the brute, driving him back.

The massive man slipped. He knelt on the ground, drooling blood onto the laminate floor, but Brick didn't stop. He brought a knee up into the brute's jaw, slammed him down on the ground, and grabbed the injured prisoner up by his collar. He was about to put a few more dents in his head, when he finally noticed the ring of guards closing in around them.

"Drop him," one of the guards yelled, brandishing his shock baton. Brick saw that some of the others had guns, held or raised, and a few looked afraid: a bad combination.

Brick obediently uncurled his fingers from the prisoner's collar and let him drop to the ground. The brute coughed, spewing gore from his ruined face, and scrabbled away. The guards remained poised.

"On the ground, prisoner."

"He started it! I was just-"

"Do it!"

Brick swallowed. He slid to his knees, palms open and raised at his sides. He saw the girls watching him, eyes wide. He didn't think the guards would shoot. Hoped not, anyway.

"It's true. He's an absolute gentleman, wouldn't hurt anyone who hadn't asked for it." The speaker was Rocko, swaggering through like owned the place.

To Brick's surprise, the Hyperion guards seemed to relax. Rocko glanced down at Brick and shot him a wink.

"You vouching for this guy, then?" growled one of the guards. Brick recognized him as Cash, the guard from the shower.

"Yep. He's with me."

Cash snorted and rolled his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. "Whatever. You got a bleeding heart, Rocky. Someone's gonna take advantage of that, someday."

Rocko matched his shrug. Even with his head walloping, fighting back nausea, Brick could read the contempt on his face. He got the idea that Cash was one of a few who regularly advantage of Rocko's bleeding heart.

"Get this idiot to the infirmary," Cash barked at some other guard, who nodded. "Get out of here, all of you. Stop digging your noses and get back to work."

The guards dispersed, casting wary looks over their shoulders at Brick. He clambered to his feet. Rocko stepped forward to steady him, and the girls flocked to his side. A nasty bruise had already bloomed across Kindle's cheek.

"Sorry," Brick said, reaching out, his fingertip grazing the bruise. She flinched away.

"Get off me, you dope. It's not that bad," she said.

"Are  _you_  okay?" Rocko asked, looking at Brick. "You took quite a pounding yourself-"

"Why didn't you step in?" Brick accused.

"Uh, excuse me? I saved you! With the guards? Remember?"

Brick scowled. "She coulda been hurt worse, and you were just standin there!"

"Maybe you haven't noticed, but I'm more of a lover than a fighter. And I wasn't the one who punched that guy. You couldn't waited. I was already coming to smooth things over."

 _Smooth things over._ The way he usually did, Brick guessed. He thought about Rocko kissing the brute's stinking, putrid mouth, and nearly lost the battle against his churning gut.

"No! Fuck. I just..." he said, letting the girls lead him back to the table. He slumped in one of the seats. "Sorry. I just ain't feeling well."

"Do you need to go to the infirmary?"

"Nah," Brick said, though he wasn't sure. But he didn't want to leave the girls alone, not even with Rocko. He didn't know the prisoner well enough to be sure he could protect them.

"You're sexy," Tina said out of the blue, staring up at Rocko with wide baby blues.

"And you're a brazen little thing. Honest, though," the man said. Tina giggled, and did Brick see her blush? He thought so. "I'm Rocko, by the way." He held a hand out to the girls.

"Kindle, and this is Tina," Kindle said, gripping the the ex-bandit's hand and giving it a firm, dignified shake.

"Good to meet you, Kindle. Tina." He nodded to the pale girl. This time, Brick was sure he saw her cheeks turn a shade pinker.

"The guards listened to you. Are you allowed to do anything you want?" Kindle asked.

"Not everything. I'm still a prisoner."

She leaned forward, glanced around, then conspiratorially whispered, "You don't have to be. We're gonna break out. You can come, too, if you want."

Rocko laughed, and Kindle looked offended. "Sorry kid, it's nothing against you, but I've seen a lot of people try to escape. None of them made it."

"They weren't us, though. We've got a demolitions expert," she said, nodding toward Tina. "And I'm practically a ninja."

"Ninja please," Tina said, and Kindle elbowed her before continuing.

She pointed to Brick. "We got this big dope. He's...the muscle, I guess. And Rocko, you been here a long time, right?" He nodded, and she continued. "So you know the prison really well. And the guards trust you. You can be our inside man."

Rocko drummed his fingers against the table. He stared into the distance, his expression thoughtful. Finally, he looked at Brick. "Well. Do you want me?"

Brick gawped.

"In the group, I mean. For the breakout," Rocko added.

"Oh! Yeah. That'd be great."

"He thought you meant..." Tina said, and made an obscene gesture with a loosely curled fist and a plastic spoon. Brick whipped the spoon out of her hand and flicked her with it.

"You got a filthy mind," he said.

The girls cackled. Despite their big talk and bravery, they were only children. Brick's head still ached to remind him of how he'd failed to protect them.

His animal had slipped away sometime during the confusion, but now Brick felt the barest murmur of it beneath his skin. _One slip,_  it promised. But its voice was unfamiliar to Brick. It didn't sound like his animal's usual chortle, anyway. He tried to remember where he'd heard that voice before, but was pulled out of his thoughts by a hand touching his.

Rocko peered at him across the table, brows knotted by concern. "You sure you're okay?"

"Yeah," Brick said. Rocko smiled, and for a moment Brick wanted to take it back.  _Actually, I'm feeling a little woozy. I'll probably need to lean on you for the rest of the day._ He returned Rocko's smile, instead. "Take more'n a knock to the head to do me in."

"Good. I'm gonna go, but I'll see you later."

"Later? When-" Brick started, but Rocko had already stood up, striding across the mess hall toward someone else. Brick watched him for a long while before looking back at the girls.

They were both staring at him with knowing looks in their eyes, biting back giggles. _Damn orphans._

"Oh, bug off," he said, sending them into fresh peals of girlish laughter.


	7. Ain't No Porcupine

Brick was doing push-ups in the narrow space between the bunks when he heard the cell block door creak open. It was impossible for anyone to come into their hall unnoticed. The doors on either side rested on heavy metal hinges, so they squalled when anyone came through.

"You're taking up the whole cell," Kindle complained. She perched on her bunk, her lanky brown legs pulled up to her chest.

"What you gotta do down here that's so important?" Brick grunted.  _Ninety-two, ninety-three._ He listened to the footsteps in the hall with one ear.

"Nothin. But it'd be nice to know I could," Kindle sniffed.

"Come down here, gurl!" Tina said. She straddled Brick's back. She'd declared her purpose to be extra weight and someone to keep count of reps, but she did a poor job of both. The girl couldn't have weighed more than eighty pounds. "Thirty, thirty-one..." she counted. "Where was I? Oh yeah, seventy-two."

"No thanks," Kindle sighed.

"You okay, kid?" Brick asked.

She didn't have time to answer before a shadow fell across them. Tina gasped and scrambled up, kicking the back of Brick's head.

"Dammit, Teeny, why'd ya...Oh."

Tina bounced up to the cell bars to greet Rocko. "It's my new boyfriend! Dang, Rocko. You looking foine. You got a booty like pow. Dat booty don't quit!"

Rocko, backlit by a halo of light from the hallway's florescent fixtures, frowned and tilted his head. A lock of jet black hair fell into his eyes, and he huffed it away. "What a mouth!"

"What you gonna do, wash it out with soap?" Tina asked, dancing in place.

Brick hauled himself to his feet. His head still throbbed after the brawl earlier, and the pushups, not even a third of what he could usually manage, had taken a toll on his back. He supposed he was 'no spring chicken', to use one of his daddy's colloquialisms. Brick sometimes forgot that thirty-eight years of his life had already passed. But Rocko, who must have been at least a decade younger, stared at him with an expression that made his toes curl and his pulse trip-trap in his wrists.

"Actually, no, no, don't do that, yuck. The soap thing. That's gross," Tina said.

"Step back, please, so I can open the door," said Briggs, who'd escorted Rocko into the block. Brick hadn't noticed him standing there before.

"They're not going to jump you," Rocko assured him. He touched the guard's arm and lingered a little too long, pulling away with a little too much drag. Anyone else would have barely noticed. Brick tried to banish the gnawing sensation from his gut.

"Let you in? Why?" he asked.

"I'm your new cellmate," Rocko said. Briggs opened the door to let Rocko step through, then closed it again with a final sounding  _clank_.

"No, you're not," Brick said.

"Sweet," Kindle said. "Can I have your old cell? These guys stink."

"They smell fine to me," Rocko said, ignoring Brick's protest.

"I said you can't stay," Brick repeated.

"Why?"

"Because..." Brick's mind raced. There was no way he could sleep in the same cell as Rocko, with his chiseled arms and gorgeous hair, and eyes that were pitch black but full of light, like the night sky over Menoetus. He wouldn't be able to resist. He'd wind up going down the Garden, just as he'd done with Mordecai and Emmett, and where had that gotten him? He shook his head. "It's too cramped in here."

"I won't take up much space, I promise," Rocko said and slung a small bundle of clothes into the corner. "Which bed is mine?"

"This one," Tina said, gesturing to her own bunk.

At the same time, Kindle giggled behind one hand and pointed to Brick's bed with the other. "That one!"

"None of 'em," Brick said.

Rocko shrugged. "Okay, don't tell me. But don't be mad up if I get confused and wind up in yours," he said: to Brick, of course.

"Don'chu dare."

Rocko looked at him solemnly, standing so close that Brick had to look straight down to meet his gaze. "I ain't no porcupine," he said, straight-faced. "Take off your kid gloves."

Brick recognized the nonsensical lyrics. It was a song he'd heard often as a kid, one of a few ancient Earth songs played by single station his family's radio picked up. He and his daddy used to set that radio on the bed of the truck when they worked the fields, blasting it as loud as it went, and they'd sung along to the same song Rocko now quoted, belting out the words tunelessly and at the top of their lungs.

"Are you ready for a thing called love?" Rocko continued earnestly.

Brick couldn't help it; he laughed. Rocko grinned.

"What the hell is a porcupine?" Kindle asked.

"Something that needs to be handled with kid gloves, if the song is to be believed," Rocko said.

"Smart-ass," Kindle snorted.

The door at the end of the hall squalled again, this time slamming open with a bang that made all four of them jump. This was followed by the even more disturbing sound of a man laughing, but the laugh wasn't right. Unearthly. It might have been the chortling of demons, or even the throaty wickering of the bird king himself, something like a loon's call. It wracked a shudder down Brick's spine.

He reached automatically for Rocko's hand, and found it. Rocko squeezed back. Kindle scrambled off the top bunk to join Tina on hers. They huddled together against the wall, their arms wrapped around each other.

"One of the messed up ones," Rocko said. "The empties."

Brick didn't know what he meant, but the words poked icy fingers of fear into his chest. The sounds drew closer. Over the impossibly loud cackling rose the harried voices of guards.

"What are we supposed to do with it?"

"Just dump it in one of the cells."

"Aren't there other prisoners here?"

"Look, the other blocks are all more full than this. They'll just have to...fuck! It bit me!"

By this point, they'd staggered into view of Brick's cell. The single prisoner was hauled down the corridor by two guards. The shackled man - Brick was reluctant to call it a man, but couldn't think of the right word - thrashed between the Hyperion guards.

At first glance, it appeared to be a pot-bellied bandit with arms like as wide around as Rocko's waist. But something awful thrust from its shoulders where a neck should have been: a long, ropy red viscera that reminded Brick of his animal's coiled side. At the top was the thing's screeching head, nothing more than a small skeletal lump with bulging white eyes. Tina let out a wavering cry and buried her face in Kindle's shoulder.

"Do you think it's contagious? Are you gonna turn into one of these things?" one of the guards asked, the one who hadn't been bitten, his voice climbing to a tremulous pitch.

"Fuck, fuck, don't say that. Goddamnit," moaned a dark haired guard that Brick recognized, again, as Cash.

The bandit continued to produce that hideous burbling laugh.

"I don't know, man," the unbitten guard said, backing away. "You seen those movies? When folks get bit...they change..."

"DAMNIT. This isn't a movie!" Cash cried. He clutched his face in his hands. Brick could see the bite now. I was a relatively small ring of bleeding welts, but deep. The blood already ran down his arm and dripped from his elbow, spattering the concrete floor.

The other guard backed away as far as he could from Cash and the mutant. "M-maybe I should call someone, and let them know-"

"NO!" Cash dropped his end of the chain and whipped the SMG off his hip. He fired a burst into the abominations head, popping its skull. The lifeless body slumped to its knees, wobbled, and fell forward onto its belly.

The other guard staggered back. "Whoah, whoah, don't-"

Cash laughed - a crazed chortle, as if the monstrosity's laugh, at the very least, had been contagious - and emptied the rest of the SMG's clip into the other guard. The man fell back against the bars of the cell across the hall, dead.

"Shit!" Brick cried.

Cash whirled around. Gore flecked his cheek, and his features were twisted into a grimace. His eyes, emptied by terror, bulged from their sockets.

Rocko stepped forward, arms raised in submission. "Cash, baby, it's okay! We saw everything. That guy was going to kill you!"

Cash only gaped, so Rocko continued.

"He saw you get bit. He thought it gave you some kind of virus, so he reached for his gun. Isn't that what happened?"

"Th-that's right," Cash said, a sly cognizance creeping back into his gaze. He slicked back his hair with a shaking hand. "He was going for his gun."

"And you defended yourself," Rocko finished.

"I had no choice." Cash's eyes darted between the bodies on the floor, then back up to Rocko. "You don't think it's really contagious, do you?"

"Don't worry, I know about those things. They're the ones from the breeding farms, the ones that didn't turn out right."

"Bandit breeding farms. I've heard about those. So...it's true?"

"Yep. That's all, nothing that can spread."

Brick had never heard of the breeding farms, but it didn't sound reassuring. It seemed to comfort Cash, though, because he holstered his sub-machine gun at last.

"I should call someone in to clean up this mess."

"Sure, absolutely. And we should probably keep this cell block closed off for awhile," Rocko said.

Cash hesitated. "Why?"

Rocko placed both palms flat against the bars and curled his fingers around, a slow roll that started at his index fingers and ended at the pinkies, until he clenched the bars in loose fists. "Well..." he hummed. "We're friends, right? I'm here, and this is the only occupied cell on the block. It would be easier for you to visit if we stayed the only ones. And if you opened the doors, of course. Hard to get any privacy in a cell with four other people."

Cash grinned. Flashed his teeth, really. Brick's fists balled at his sides.

"You're smooth. I better watch out for you," Cash said.

Rocko chuckled, but there was no music in it now. "You can watch me all you like, gorgeous."

"Eh. Sure. Why not? I'll give you run of the block. You've always been my favorite, Rocky."

At the utterance of that nickname, Rocko loosed his hold on the bars and stepped back. His voice was chilly when he said, "I know. You'd better call someone now, or it won't look right.

Cash winked before disappearing from view. A few moments later, Brick heard him swing open the door at the end of the block and yell out; "Help! We got an emergency!"

Briggs was the first to arrive. Cash didn't put on any show for him, just shrugged and tousled the horrified guard's hair. "Just a little mess. No biggie." As if he hadn't been freaking out only a few minutes before. "Medics will be here in a sec, though I doubt they'll be able to do much."

"God," Briggs said. "What a mess."

Brick, Rocko and the girls retreated to their bunks to wait while the medics filed in, followed by people with gurneys to haul off the bodies. The guards left with them. The door slammed shut again, leaving the four prisoners alone.

"How'd you like the welcome wagon?" Kindle asked, breaking the silence.

"Very welcoming. Felt like I was back in the clan," Rocko said.

"A bandit clan?" Kindle asked. "Then you've seen the breeding farms?"

"Yes, and no. I'm not actually sure the farms exist. As far as I know, none of the clans in the Highlands had them."

"But, that freak...I've never seen anything like it."

"I've seen a few, all a little different. They're from somewhere west of the Divide. It might be farms. Folks say some bandit clans have underground facilities where they keep women to breed with, and when the babies are born, they get hooked up to machines and pumped full of chemicals that make them grow fast. That sometimes they grow up wrong. Their parts get larger at different rates, or their brains don't develop. They get to be like big, insane babies."

Brick shuddered.

"Bullshit," Kindle said. The two girls lay out together in the same bunk, arms wrapped around each other, eyes wide in the shadows. "That's impossible."

"You're probably right," Rocko admitted.

All at once, the lights turned out, plunging the cell into darkness. It was pitch-black. They might have been deep under the sea, or in a void. Brick's gut cramped with Pavlovian panic.

Tina's cheerful voice rose from that impenetrable darkness. "Let's tell more scary stories."

"No way! I mean, I'm not scared. Just tired," said Kindle.

"Please please please please please! I got a reeeeaaaaally scary one. It's prob'y the scariest thing I ever heard, a total pants pisser."

The was a momentary silence as Kindle struggled with her curiosity. "...Fine. One story. What is it?"

"Yay! Okay. On a dark and stormy night, I saw...yo' face!"

Brick heard the rustling of fabric, followed by Tina's squeal, then her total collapse into hooting laughter. "N-no fair! No tickling! AHHHHH!"

"Noisy kids. Good thing we got the block to ourselves," Brick said. The knot of tension that gripped his spine when the darkness came down finally began to unwind.

"I'll talk to Cash tomorrow about the specifics, but I think he'll give us the run," Rocko said. "I used to have eight cells in my old unit, and this block might be even bigger."

"Wow, a whole eight cells," Kindle snorted. "You're like royalty."

"Better than being crammed into one," Rocko said. The girl had no argument for that. They were quiet for awhile, tossing and turning and trying to get comfortable on the ratty old bunks.

"Let's pray," Kindle said after awhile.

Brick blushed. He hadn't prayed in front of anyone in years, not since he was a kid. Not since Emmett.

"Pray by yourself, kid," he said.

He expected some scathing retort from Kindle, but her voice was kind when she said, "You don't have to be embarrassed. I'll pray, and you can just say amen. Okay?"

Kindle recited the familiar prayer and the less familiar second verse, and when she closed it with amen, Brick said it, too, and was shocked to hear Rocko and Tina do the same. They were almost like a family for a moment. Then someone let loose a hellish fart, and the moment was over, the cell filled noxious smell and the sound of Kindle tickling Tina into submission.

Soon silence fell, interrupted only by the stillness of breathing from across the room where the two girls slumbered in a heap.

Brick dozed. He dreamed about Mordecai.


	8. Good Enough

"Damnit, Brick! You promised! You swore you'd stay back. Oh, fuck, Roland and Lil are going to kill me..."

Brick coughed. Pain split his chest like a vice, and he wondered again what happened, what the hell happened, why was he bleeding and dying on the ground. He had to be dying. Nothing less could hurt so badly. Mordecai was doing something, fumbling the cap off a long, terrible looking syringe.

"Don't," Brick said, but the effort of talking nearly forced him into darkness. Mordeca ignored his protest and jammed the needle deep into his chest.

At first the pain swelled, then receded. Tendrils of numbness crept out from the injection site.

"...didn't mean to...block your shot," Brick wheezed. He guessed that was why Mordecai was swearing at him, but he found it hard to think. Hard to breathe, too.

Mordecai produced a strange, choked laugh, like he couldn't breathe, either. Brick wouldn't understand until later that Mordecai had been crying.

"Idiot.  _Baboso._ Please don't die. You piss me off so much."

Mordecai's mind and body seemed conflicted on that point, though, because even as he swore at Brick, he clutched one of the larger man's hands in both of his own. He kissed Brick's palm, right in the middle where the lines creased together.

It struck Brick as strange, too familiar a gesture for friends who hadn't known each other long. He'd only met Mordecai a handful of months ago. But the kiss caused something to flutter inside him, something like a bird- a skinny, arrogant, hot tempered bird, which would roost in his heart and refuse to be startled away, no matter how many times Brick shooed it.

He tried to shoo that feeling now, tried to be mad, because he finally understood that Mordecai had shot him. He found it impossible to be angry. He'd just fallen in love.

Brick shivered in the hot Pandoran sun, and one dream swooned into the next.

They were in the Fathoms ( _where I am now_ , an omnipresent Brick reminded), camped in the moonshadow of a Catch-a-Ride station. It was a bare shelter, only a few steel pylons to hold up a corrugated tin roof. It didn't matter. The weather was none, and Brick and Mordecai were the only living beings for miles around.

They pawed each other through their clothes. Eventually they managed to strip away their belts and bandoliers, to shed their shirts and unzip their pants. They frotted under an endless seabed sky, and Brick gazed into that bowl of stars while Mordecai panted against his neck.

They'd come to the Fathoms to work for Athena, but that didn't explain why they'd ditched Roland and Lilith, or why they'd driven off in the night, giggling like lovers across the desert. In truth, they'd come to the Fathoms to be alone: to fight, to fuck, to figure out what they wanted from each other.

His train of thought was interrupted by Mordecai asking him to screw him - demanding it, really - in a short, needy huff. They'd never done that before. Brick didn't know how, exactly. He didn't know where to plant his knees or how to hold Mordecai to line things up, but that was fine, because they fumbled through it together.

They did it face to face.  _So I can push you off if you get too rough_ , Mordecai explained when Brick asked him why, although he never did get too rough. Their height difference put them ear to ear. When they finally worked out the position, Mordecai wriggled nervously.

_Go slow, please, take it easy, I've never...Oh._

Brick pushed into him as carefully as he'd asked, with aching slowness.  _Oh,_ Mordecai repeated between hard sucks of breath, again and again, softer each time.  _Oh._ For as long as he lived, Brick would never forget the curve of that syllable in his ear.

They went like that for awhile, screwing with a kind of gentle amazement. Soon, Mordecai began to press back, making desperate little demands with his body and then with his mouth. He sobbed for Brick to take him faster, deeper, until they were rutting together in frantic, uncoordinated rhythm, Mordecai cursing so loud that all the bandits in the Fathoms might have heard.

 _Mordy,_ Brick gasped. Later, during one of his frequent fits of embarrassment, Mordecai would ask him not to say his name while they fucked.  _It's gay,_  he'd say, cutting Brick deep. But this time, he allowed it. This time, he clenched around Brick like a hot, humid night, moaning against his neck as he came.

He moaned a name.  _Brick..._

Brick woke with a start, with tears drying on his cheeks and his dick tenting his pants. The former was easily wiped away, but the latter would be a more persistent problem.

"Brick?" came a whisper from above. "Are you awake?"

For a moment, he considered pretending to be asleep. "Yeah," he said.

"Oh, good. I...I'm a little homesick," Rocko said.

"For your bandit clan?"

"For my cell."

Brick laughed without meaning to. There was a hitch in one set of girlish snoring, then the steady  _honk-shew_  resumed. Brick breathed out. "Come down here," he whispered, as unexpectedly as he'd laughed.

There came a shuffling and shifting from above. Rocko grunted as he dropped down over the edge and sidled into Brick's bunk, rolling over his body to wriggle in between him and the wall.

"Hi," he said, flopping his arm around Brick's waist.

"Hi," Brick said, and wondered if Rocko had noticed his condition when he scrambled across. He didn't want the other man to think he'd called him down for sex. But he hadn't, or, if he had, he didn't mention it.

"Do you miss yours? Your clan, I mean," Rocko asked.

"It wasn't a...I mean...No," Brick said, surprised by his own answer, but it was the truth. "I wish I knew who...who didn't make it out, but I don't really miss bein there. I had friends, nobody close. I miss my dog, I guess, but he's dead."

"Ouch. Sorry."

"How 'bout you? You miss yours?" Brick asked, eager to change the topic.

"Just the king. Like I said, all the rest were crazy assholes. But, man, Stone was great. I would have done anything for him. We were kind of fucked up, but after he died, I was still fucked up, but I was alone, too." Rocko laughed shakily. "Forget it. Anyway, I don't miss my clan at all. It's amazing how people are. Whatever shit you're living in, that's just life. You can get used to anything."

Brick gnawed his lip and touched Rocko's hand, their fingers jumbling together. "What're you doin here?"

"I thought I told you. The other bandits sold me to the warden."

"No, not the prison. I was talkin about my cell."

"Oh!" Rocko laughed, then clapped his free hand over his mouth, as though surprised by the escape of that perfectly round syllable. "I thought...Well. You remind me of him."

That was honest, and Brick liked it. It struck him as a good reason for their tangled fingers, and legs that moved to do the same. When their lips crushed together in the dark, it was a good enough reason for that, too.

Rocko kissed differently than Mordecai, with practiced languor rather than clumsy passion, but it filled Brick with a giddy excitement that made him think,  _I cant take any more of this, I can't,_  until Rocko pulled away to kiss his cheeks and eyelids, soft little pecks that unfurled Brick's heart like the slow opening of petals. He found that he could take more, and their mouths met again.

"Can I?" Rocko asked, tugging on the hem of Brick's pants.

"Y-yeah," Brick said.

Rocko stroked him expertly. When he sunk down on the bed to take Brick into his mouth, he did that expertly, too, bobbing around his shaft in a smooth, steady rhythm. It still took Brick a long while to finish. Some self-sabotaging part of his brain wouldn't shut up about how skilled Rocko was.  _He's practiced,_  the voice nagged.  _He's done this a lot, with so many other guys._

Shut up, shut up, Brick begged the voice, and tried to focus of the feeling of Rocko's hot mouth around his dick, on the flick of his tongue against the underside.

But when he finally got there, it was because of another thought. Just a quick flash of Mordecai - the peculiar smoke and citrus smell of his dreads, and the tension of his narrow frame - breathing 'oh' as Brick pressed into him, fingernails biting crescents into his back.

Brick made no sound as he came, and felt a rush of guilt for not giving Rocko a chance to pull away.  _He doesn't mind. He's used to it,_  grinned that goddamned voice.

Rocko didn't say anything about it as he came up to kiss Brick again. Brick tried to reciprocate, fumbling with the hem of Rocko's pants, but was too sated and sleepy to manage. Rocko fended off his clumsy attempts with more kisses.

"You'll get me later," he said, whispering it against Brick's mouth.

"Yeah," Brick agreed. Sleep dragged him with insistent fingers. He drowsed, diving into the depths of sleep, Rocko's limbs still tangled with his own.


	9. Eight Weeks

Cash made good on his word. The next day, he opened all the cells on the block. The prisoners flooded into the hall, eager to stretch their legs and get some space from the other three.

"Be good, kids," Cash said, with a wink and that shitsucking grin Brick hated. "I'll check on you in awhile."

"Looking forward to it, gorgeous," Rocko said But when the guard turned around, he flashed a sly look at Brick. He mouthed one word- ' _not_ '. The heavy door banged shut behind Cash, locking automatically.

"Dibs on this room!" Tina shouted, dancing down the block, arms outstretched so her fingers grazed the bars of the open cells. "And this one, and this one. Oh, oh, and this one too."

Kindle tagged after her, peering into each identical cell. "You can't dibs on all of them. Whaddya need so many for, anyway?"

"Pull that stick out your butt, Spits. You can stay in my crib. This'll be the bathroom...there's the veranda...yeah, my chaise lounge would look DIVINE right there."

"Spits? Is that me?" Kindle asked, ducking into one of the cells to investigate.

"Yeah, gurl! Short for Spitfire."

"You...that's...you just made up Spitfire! You can't give me a nickname for a nickname you just thought up."

"Whatevs, Spits. This last room is for Big and Rocko."

Brick caught up to her, finally. She stood in the last cell on the block, hands on her hips, stance wide. When she saw Brick, she gestured around grandly. The cell looked the same as the rest.

"Thanks," he scoffed. "You get all the other rooms, an me and Rocko are stuck in one?"

Tina stuck her tongue out at him. "You woulda shacked up anyway. Now you got an excuse."

Brick grunted, bent down, and hefted the girl over his shoulder. "If this is my room, that means you're trespessin."

She yowled and flailed as Brick hauled her into the next cell over. Kindle sat cross-legged on an upper bunk. She looked up when they came in, a smile playing around the corners of her mouth.

"Delivery!" Brick announced, and dumped Tina across the other girl's lap.

* * *

A week later, Briggs singsonged the same thing as he edged sideways through the door. He and Cash sidled in with a lopsided, lumpy old couch carried between them.

"Ohhhh, my chaise!" Tina said, jumping up to sprawl across it. Cash grunted and dropped his end, causing Briggs to do the same. The couch landed on the concrete with a thump, and a puff of dust billowed up from the threadbare cushions. Tina sneezed.

Cash waved the cloud away from his face and slouched against the back. "Figured this would be more comfortable than sitting on the floor or the shitter."

"Watch your mouth in front of the kids," Briggs said.

"Blow me," Cash said. "Did you remember the clothes?"

Brigg's face lit up. "Oh, yeah! I found these yesterday."

He plucked a yellow and white bundle (after two weeks in Hyperion lockup, Brick thought he might see those colors behind his eyelids for the rest of his life) out from between the couch cushions, held it up, and let it unfurl like a flag. It was a smaller version of the jumpsuits Brick and Rocko wore.

Briggs tossed the first to Tina and retrieved the other for Kindle. "They're for midgets," he explained. "It's about time you had some clothes that aren't boxer shorts."

"I knew it! I knew they were underwear," Kindle said.

Brick saw Cash pull something from his pocket and palm it to Rocko. It crinkled between their hands, and Rocko stuck the object into the folds of his jumpsuit.

Rocko caught Brick's gaze and grinned. "Just cigs. I'll share."

Something transpired across Cash's face: an almost imperceptible tightening, a crinkling at the corners of his eyes. He scoffed. "You want to waste them on your dog, I wont stop you. But that's all for the week."

* * *

Cash called Brick a dog again a week later. The four of them had been at mess, forcing down another meal of barely edible pastes, the girls bickering amicably while Brick and Rocko's feet bumped beneath the table, when the dark-haired guard approached them.

"Come on, Rocky," He said. Brick stood, too, but Cash wagged his finger. "Sit. Stay. Good dog."

Brick watched their retreating forms. He saw Cash's hand creep up to rest against the Rocko's lower back, and had a horrifying thought, horrifying because of how innocuous it felt.  _Wish we were home._ But he hadn't been thinking of New Haven. He'd thought only as far as their cell block, to the unit at the end of the hall which he and Rocko shared.

Later, alone in that cell, Brick undressed under Rocko's scrutiny.

"Do you hafta stare at me?" Brick asked, undershirt bunched in his hands, worrying it with a twist of his wrists.

"I do," Rocko said, then whistled low. When he spoke again, it was to sing. "He's a Brick- HOUSE- mighty might, jes' letting it all hang out-"

With an exaggerated eye roll, Brick tossed his shirt at Rocko. It slid down the man's face and into his lap.

"Of course he's stacked, and that's a fact, ain't nothing holding ba...mph!" Rocko persisted, until Brick shut his mouth by covering it with his own, pinning him to the bed in a deep, quelling kiss.

After they parted, Brick planted a trail of kisses down the other man's neck, licking and nipping, until a rush of air sucked between Rocko's teeth made him pause. He'd become familiar with Rocko's noises over the past three week. This was no pleasured gasp, but a pained hiss. Brick snapped alert, pulling away to inspect the younger man's neck. He found a jagged purple ring, a bruised bite.

"It's nothing," Rocko said, reaching up to hide the blotch.

Brick pushed his hands aside and inspected the long slope of Rocko's neck. More of angry welts marred his olive skin, sucked and bitten well past the point of pleasure. Fury cramped Brick's gut. He thumbed the marks with trembling hands.

"Why'd you let him do this?" he asked.

"It's not like I had a choice."

"You said you did. Remember? You said, 'at least I have a choice here.'"

Rocko snorted. "Good retention for a man who loses his pants in a six by eight cell."

"Don't get nasty with me. You said," Brick insisted.

Rocko sighed and reached up to wrap his arms around Brick's broad shoulders, pulling him close. "I'm here now. Please, don't bully me too," he begged against Brick's neck, breaking his heart a little.

"Hey! You making us a baby brother in there?" Tina yelled from down the hall.

"Teeny, that's rude," Kindle whispered furiously. "Besides, I'm sure they're using protection."

They both laughed at that, and their girlish chortles forced an unwitting smile from Brick.

* * *

Kindle and Tina often laughed, even by week four. Sometimes at private jokes passed behind their hands, other times openly, usually at the expense of the adults. But sometimes, the best times, they laughed all together.

One day, while the block was unusually silent, Rocko pointed out that the girls' chatter had been suspiciously absent all morning. "Mungojerrie and Rumpleteaser are up to no good," he warned.

Brick paused, mid-sit up, to raise a questioning eyebrow.

Rocko looked surprised. "Mungojerrie? Rumpleteazer? Notorious couple of cats?" he asked.

Brick shrugged. "No idea what you're talkin about."

"Knockabout clowns! Quick-change comedians!" Rocko insisted, hopping off the bunk to wander into the hall. "Tightrope walkers and acrobats!"

Brick rolled his eyes, stood up, and followed him out of the cell. "It's another song, innit?"

"You got it, babe."

Rocko's voice - lovely in laughter, sweetly pleading in bed - was just as pretty in song, turning the nonsense lyrics into something almost magical, belting them out as he swayed down the hall. "They had an extensive reputation, made their home in Victoria Grove..."

A few verses later, as Rocko declared that the two cats had a wonderful way of working together, Kindle's shout finally erupted from one of the cells. "We're trying to sleep!"

"Well, stop trying," Rocko called back, wandering toward the source of her voice. "It's almost noon."

The girl groaned. "Who can tell without the sun?"

"Yeah, we're tired. Get outta here, Queen," Tina added. Brick couldn't into the cell from where he stood, but he saw Tina's pillow hurtle through the doorway. Rocko caught it and tossed it back with a huff.

"Did you just call me a queen?"

"Nah, gurl. Just Queen. It's your nickname."

For a moment, Rocko seemed unsure, but then he smiled. "Because I rule the block, right?"

"Nope. 'cos you're a flaming homo."

The  _smack_  of the girls' high-five echoed through the hallway.

* * *

"Those kids are great," Briggs said as he bridged a deck of tattered cards. He botched up the shuffle, and one of the cards popped free. It slid across the table and came to rest in front of Brick. A picture of a woman with teased blond hair, body contorted into an uncomfortable looking 'S' shape, baring her tawny ass and tits, looked up luridly from the card's face. Brick flicked it back across the table.

"They think you're great, too," he said.

The girls adored the guards, and not just because they came bearing gifts more often than not (once they brought a handheld game, which drove Rocko crazy with it's bloops and bleeps, and was bickered over constantly by the other three) but also because the guards were kind to them - Briggs, more than Cash - and because all of them had forged a kind of screwed up friendship.

Sometimes, like now, Cash and Briggs slipped into the block in after lights out. They came to drink and play poker by candlelight with Brick and Rocko.

"I'm glad. I like to think that Amy would have been a lot like them," Briggs said. He attempted the bridge again, was successful, and dealt the cards with quick flicks of his wrist.

"Don't start with that," Cash groaned. "Nobody wants to hear you whine. Boo hoo, my baby died, my wife blames me, blah, blah, blah. You're killing my buzz." He took another swig off his beer to fend off any sobriety that Briggs might deliver.

"You know, I wasn't even going to...And you basically told it, anyway. But it wasn't like that. I mean, she left, but not because she blamed me. It was just..." Briggs shrugged. "One of those things."

"Ante in," Cash muttered, pushing in a couple battered chips. They didn't trade out for anything besides cigarettes, and the value depended entirely on Cash's mood.

"I'm out," Rocko said, folding his cards down in front of him. "Sorry to hear that, Briggs. I'll bet you'd have been a great dad. I'm glad Kindle and Tina have you around."

Brick shuddered. Something had been happening over the five weeks since he'd arrived, some subtle slide toward sleep. The comfort of routine and the companionship of Rocko and the girls lulled him into a stupor. Rocko's words roused him briefly.  _That's wrong,_  he thought. The girls weren't lucky at all. They were prisoners, all four of them. The guards only seemed like friends because-

Brick blinked, suddenly aware of everyone's eyes on him, waiting to know if he'd fold or ante. He glanced down at his cards.

"I'm in," he mumbled at last, and flipped his chips back into the pot.

* * *

Later, in absolute darkness, with Rocko reaching down to guide him, there was no need for Brick to announce when he was in. He could feel the hot clench of the other man around him, could hear the woodwind hitch in his breathe as he was split. Rocko flexed, then relaxed, giving Brick permission to move again. They coupled like coiled snakes, mouths meeting fleetingly in the dark.

After awhile, they changed positions. Rocko went to his elbows and knees while Brick crouched over him, one leg swung over the side of the bed to brace against the floor. Brick dug his nails into Rocko's hips while he pulled the smaller man against him, over and over, hard enough to hear the slap of flesh over their grunting.

Rocko reached back to place his hand over Brick's. "Hey, not so rough," he said between ragged gasps.

"Sorry," Brick said. He leaned forward to kiss the sweaty curve of Rocko's spine, to reach a hand under his chest, tweaking a nipple, sliding down further to grasp him. Rocko gasped and arched into the loosely clenched fist. Even though he'd slowed down, Brick didn't last long.

"Uh...Sorry for that, too," he said, grateful for the cover of darkness to hide his blush.

"It's okay. I- Oh! Uh..." Rocko said, surprised, as Brick flipped him onto his back. The larger man's hot mouth roved down his chest, exploring the low slopes of his abs, down and down, until- "F-fuck," Rocko gasped, with a little whimper that made Brick's toes curl.

Brick couldn't help but think, like he always did, about how it was different with Rocko that it had been with Mordecai. They both liked to thrust into his mouth, but Rocko's hips rolled like the sea - a slow, languorous hump - while Mordecai used to lose control toward his climax, rutting in hard, fast jerks, fingers scrabbling for purchase against Brick's shorn scalp.

"I'm close," Rocko groaned.

Brick didn't pull away. Instead, he reached up to grip the writhing man's hips, digging his fingers into the hard, flexing haunch where ass and thigh met, and kept up his rhythm. Rocko's hips came half up off the bed as his writhing stopped, turned to stillness and a twitch against Brick's tongue, a hot spurt against the back of his throat. Then he went slack, sinking back into the bunk. Rocko's shaky, post-coital breathing sounded loud in the cell.

"Wow," he said. "That's a good apology."

Brick chuckled as he slid up to join him, bodies pressed together on the narrow mattress. "Don' want'cha to think I'm a slouch in bed. I gotta stack up."

"Mm. You'll be happy to hear that you won't have as much competition, anymore."

There came the  _skitch_  of match being struck, and a flickery red flame bloomed in the darkness. It moved, illuminating Rocko's face as he held it to the cigarette clamped between his lips. He shook out the match with a contemplative hum, sucked a long inhale from the cigarette, and sighed. "Told Cash to fuck off."

"Seriously? When?"

"Couple days ago, after poker. Remember that? He got sloshed and dragged me down to the showers. You were asleep when I got back."

"Yeah...kinda." Brick did remember, but barely. He'd gotten pretty sloshed himself.

"I told him that I didn't wanna do it anymore," Rocko said, and gave a wry, humorless laugh. "Of course, he threatened me and did it anyways, but he hasn't come around since, so who knows? Maybe he got he message."

"He raped you?" Brick asked, aghast.

Rocko took another drag off his cigarette. Brick could feel him trembling, but his voice was steady when he said, "That's such an ugly way to put it. But, yeah. I guess he did."

"Fuck. Goddamn him," Brick swore. "I'll fucking kill him."

"Don't do that. It'll just make things difficult for us."

"Is it cos of me? Issat why you told him off?"

Rocko hesitated. "Not like you think."

"God, I'm sorry. I didn't know, I wouldn't have-"

"Listen, it's not that way. It's just that I hadn't been with someone for love in a long time, so it got easy to do it with the guards, even bastards like Cash. Now it's different. I..." Rocko coughed, then amended, too late. "Like. Not love. Sorry."

"Uh-huh," Brick grinned, watching Rocko squirm by the light of smoldering ashes. "I love y-"

"Don't. Don't do that. You know how you said that you can't share?"

Brick frowned. "Yeah?"

"I can't, either. I can't share you with Mordy."

Brick froze at the mention of Mordecai's nickname. "How...?"

"You say his name in your sleep. It's okay, though. I get it."

Brick didn't know what to say. He burned with shame, feeling his blush as brightly as the cigarette's dying glow, and tried to pull away from Rocko. The younger man caught his wrist.

With his other hand, he jammed the butt of the cigarette out against the wall, plunging them back into darkness. Brick wasn't afraid. He couldn't be, not with Rocko leaning across him, seeking his mouth and finding it, plying him with sweet, shallow kisses.

They went on like that until Brick fell asleep in his arms.

* * *

By their seventh week as prisoners, they still kissed every day, but not with the resignation of routine. Every kiss was a fresh delight to Brick. They stood in the hall, holding each other and making out like a pair of teenagers.

From the hallway behind Brick came a great, gushing inhalation. "My darling! Oh, my darling! I have been betrayed!"

Rocko peered around Brick's shoulder, his mouth dropping open in an exaggerated 'o'. Brick rolled his eyes.

"It isn't what it looks like, my love! He means nothing to me!" Rocko cried. He shoved Brick aside; that is, he pushed him as hard as he could, and the larger man stepped in the direction he seemed to be supposed to go, crossing his arms and slouching against the wall between two cells.

"No! No words." Tina sunk to her knees, one wrist thrown across her eyes. "Your betrayal is too much for me to bear! You have killed me, lover. I will perish of a broken heart."

Rocko strutted toward her, arms flung out dramatically. "Curse my foolish whims! We were going to see Paris." He dropped to his knees in front of Tina.

She slumped into his arms, spouting an imaginative string of death gurgles. "Argh, ughghghghgh. Phwah, blegh, oomph. Kay, I'm dead."

"Cruel fate! Is there nothing that can bring her back?"

"A kiss," Tina whispered.

Rocko looked from side to side, feigning shock. "Who said that?"

"This is, uh, Tina's ghost. You better kiss her- Er, me. My body."

"Gross. I'm not going to kiss a dead body."

Tina lost patience and shot up, miraculously revived, to press her lips against Rocko's. Just a peck, but he jolted and scrambled away so fast that he fell back on his butt.

"Whoah, kid," he said, a blush creeping across his cheeks. "That's not in the script."

"You makin' a move on my girl?" Brick asked, grinning and leaning up off the doorframe.

Tina leaped up and danced down the hall, sneakers scuffing and squeaking against the floor. "Oh, Big, I was just playin! I know Queen is your prison bitch."

"Hey," Rocko sulked.

"More like my boyfriend," Brick corrected.

"Gross."

"Boyfriend is gross, but prison bitch is fine?" Brick asked.

Tina ducked into one of the cells, presumably to bother Kindle for awhile. But first she said, "Rocko is ALWAYS foine, Big. You should know that. He's your bf."

Brick had to agree.

* * *

A week later, a full eight weeks after their capture in New Haven, Brick and Kindle found themselves unable to agree.

"We've gotta do something!" Kindle said.

"We are doin something! The guards trust us. That's important," Brick said.

"Of course they trust us! We've been model-fucking-citizens for months. Do you even want to escape anymore?"

"You know I do," Brick growled.

"Then let's talk about it, or something, anything. Have you noticed the security keys? The ones that the guards carry?"

Brick knew the keys she meant. He'd seen Cash and Briggs use them to unlock several doors in the prison, including the inner door of their block- just an inconspicuous wedge-shaped piece of metal, about the size of a guitar pick.

Kindle whispered, "I'm gonna steal one!"

"Too dangerous," Brick said automatically, although it seemed like a good move. He honestly hadn't thought about the breakout in weeks. Stealing the chip hadn't even crossed his mind. "You could get caught."

"Yeah, I know, but I gotta try. What else can we do? Just live here?"

Brick almost said, why not?  _Good as anywhere else. Regular meals, and nobody burning the place around us._ But he just shrugged. "What about Teeny? She's got somethin she still needs to do, right? For the, uh...?"

Kindle's fingers fluttered up, formed a knot, then-  _boom_ \- parted with a flourish. "Bombs," she said, negating the need the the gesture.

"Yeah. How's that goin?" Brick asked.

She shrugged. "She needs some stuff, but it's going, I guess. Not fast enough. You think you could talk the guards into giving us more time at mess? I need a chance to sneak off and find some cleaning supplies."

Brick hesitated. "Fine. I'll work somethin out."

"Good. Cool," she said, and sighed. "I gotta say, I thought you were chickening out. Getting too buddy-buddy with the guards. I was...you know. Scared."

"Nah. We're a team, remember?"

"Yeah." Kindle looked very young, suddenly. Her small hands drifted up to curl through her hair, tugging and twisting, a nervous gesture the Brick had never seen her do before. It made her look just like Amanda at that age, who used to constantly tangle her fingers through her tremendous cascade of curls.

Moved by sudden, urgent emotion, Brick pulled Kindle into a hug. She tensed, but, by inches, relaxed into his embrace, her own arms wrapping around him, and buried her face in his shirt.

Brick pressed his own face against her hair, a thick mop of kinks that looked and smelled like a plume of smoke, to kiss the top of her head.

"Dork," she said, voice muffled against his chest.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, and pushed her away. She wiped her eyes quickly with the back of her hand, and Brick yawned. "Almost lights out. We better get to our bunks of we don't wanna be trippin over our dicks in the dark."

"Kay. I'll get everyone," she said, and hurried into the hall, calling for Rocko and Tina.

Their routine was the same every night. They huddled into one cell to pray - both parts, Amen - then the girls would snuggle into the single bed that the two of them shared. As Rocko backed out of the cell, to the accompaniment of Kindle and Tina's long-suffering groans, he'd sing; "Irene, goodnight, Irene, goodnight. Goodnight, Irene, goodnight, Irene, I will see you in my dreams," and laugh as they heckled him.


	10. Given to Rove

Rocko reclined across the couch, legs kicked up over the arm, head resting on Brick's thigh. He sucked the end of a pen and squinted at the folded book in his hand.

Tina sat cross legged on the floor with a sprawl of parts around her- plastic bottles and scraps of foil, the stuff for works bombs. When Brick had asked her about it, she explained that she'd snuck in volatile component that could make those babies really sing.  _How'd you sneak it in?_  He'd asked, naively. She'd laughed at his discomfort when she confessed;  _The guards wouldn't cavity search a ten year old girl._

"Here's one for you, Teeny," Rocko said. "Eight-letter word for posterior. Starts with b."

"Wassat? Posterior?" Tina asked.

"The back of something. Like a butt," Rocko said.

"Is it butt?"

"Nope, that's four letters. Needs to be eight."

"Booty? No, wait...is it badonk? I bet it's badonk."

"Still too short."

"Badonkadonk!"

"Dumper," Brick grunted.

"That...that's not even...no."

"Backside," Kindle said. She was laid out on an upper bunk in the cell, arms crossed behind her head. Brick had thought she was sleeping.

Rocko scribbled 'backside' into the squares. It fit, and the 'e' lined up with an already filled column. "Yep. Nice."

He filled out the next box without asking for help. Brick found that the neatly spaced boxes around the letters made them easier to read, a little less slippery. Rocko had printed 'Sabre'.

"Buddy of mine had a sabre turret," Brick said. "Got it in the Lance.

Rocko looked up at him. "Dahl made them first, you know. Atlas stole the technology."

"Cool. How'd you know that?"

Rocko looked back at the book. "Mm. Used to work for Dahl. I'm an engineer."

Brick's mouth dropped open. "I known you for two months, and you just now tell me you're an engineer?"

"Well, not a good one. I cheated my way through school, and I was pretty much the worst engineer in the company. Then I met Stone. Actually, he raided the Dahl base and stole everything that wasn't nailed down. Carried me out over his shoulder," he said, smiling at the memory. He paused, and when he spoke again, it was to croon robustly; "Everybody has to pay, when love finally has her say."

"Oh God, he's singing," Kindle groaned. She sat up, her hair mussed and stuck up from her pillow, and she slouched forward to wrap her arms around her knees.

"You love it. You just like to complain," Rocko said.

"I do not!"

"You kinda do, Spits," Tina said. "Remember when Queen taught us to swing-dance, and everyone was doin it, and even the guards and shizz, but you were like..." Tina stopped and continued in a faux posh accent. "Oh, I am  _far_ too proper to engage in such commoner festivies! I might chip a royal nail!"

"I didn't say that!"

"I paraphrased, but that's basically what you said. And when you finally danced, you were better'n all of us, even Queen."

"You were," Rocko agreed.

Pride straightened Kindle's spine. She sat up a little straighter, a smile threatening to break across her face. "I did. I was awesome. But, it was still kind of stupid."

"So's your face, but we put up with it," Brick said.

Kindle glared daggers into him. "So have you asked the guards about getting more time at mess?" she asked.

Brick was glad to have the right answer. "Yep. I was gonna wait til Cash gets here, make it a surprise, but since you asked. The guys came for poker last night, an', long story short, we're gonna have full run of mess. Since it's right off our block, they're gonna leave that side unlocked-"

"You're shittin me!" Tina cried, leaping up off the floor.

"Nope. God's honest."

Kindle didn't react the way Brick expected. She stared out into the hall, her gaze unfocused. "What'd you have to do for it?" she asked.

"Nothin," Brick said, earning a grateful glance from Rocko. It was a lie, but the truth was nothing the girls needed to hear.

Kindle looked back at them. Her eyes had turned into ashy, smoking coals, burning holes into Brick. "Really? 'cos I doubt that. Nothing's ever for nothing."

Rocko peered over the top of his crossword. "I thought you'd be happy, Spits. You're the one who's so eager to get out. Now you'll have time to round up supplies."

"I don't need your kind of help."

"Dang, gurl, chill your glutes. What're you getting all bent up about?" Tina asked.

"I'm tired of this! I'm tired of everybody playing nice with the guards. You guys think you're in control, but it's only cos they let you think that. They're tricking you, and you're dumb enough to fall for it."

"We ain't dumb, kid. We're still trying to get out. It's just taking awhile. So why donchu calm down and-"

"No!" Kindle yelled, and jumped down off the bed. "Don't tell me to calm down. I'm sick of playing house. I'm not your kid, and we're not a family!"

Tina shrunk back against the wall, but Kindle went on. "Families don't live in prison! A dad wouldn't have to blow a Goddamned guard, just to...to get..." She looked away, unable to meet Rocko's alarmed gaze.

Suddenly, Brick understood. Kindle must have gotten up after lights out, wandered the hall, and been drawn by the flicker of flames from the cell where the adults played cards. If she'd looked in, how much had she seen?

Maybe she'd only heard Cash's awful, drunken proposition, "I'll do you one better. I'll just leave that door unlocked. We done it for people before, guys we could trust. Can I trust you, Rocky? Why don't you prove it? Suck me off. No, do it here, in front of your dog. I want him to know who you belong to."

Maybe Kindle had seen how Rocko tried to look at Brick, to look a question at him, but Cash had gripped his jaw savagely. "Don't fucking ask him. You're mine, okay? Show me you're loyal, and I'll unlock the door tomorrow." And he'd dragged Rocko in to kiss him on the mouth, which was somehow worse than all of it, even worse than what came next.

Had Kindle left after that? Or had she seen the rest, the way Brick had?

"Sometimes, adults have to do things," Rocko tried.

Kindle still wouldn't look at him. She glared at ground and shook her head. "You didn't-"

She was interrupted by the squalling door at the end of the block. Tina and Kindle scrambled to kick the bottle bomb parts underneath the bunk. They'd finished hiding the evidence and and stood up straight by the time Cash appeared in the cell doorway. The lights from the hall made him look like a man made out of shadows, and when he grinned, his teeth seemed too bright. Briggs followed close behind him.

"Hey, Gorgeous," Rocko said, swinging his legs down off the couch to sit up.

"Mornin, Rocky. You got pretty trashed last night, so I thought I'd see how you were doing. Take you to shower, if you want," Cash said.

Brick watched the expression on Rocko's face become closed, the way it did every time Cash called him Rocky. The guard knew he hated it. "I'm fine. Guess you won't be escorting us to mess today."

Cash's grin grew wider. "Oh? Why not?"

"Because..." Rocko hesitated, gauging the guard who loomed in their doorway. There was no confusion on Cash's face- only a sly glitter in his slitted eyes. "Because you're unlocking the door. That's why you're here," Rocko said.

"What? You thought I was serious about that? I was joking, obviously!"

Rocko and Brick leaped up off the couch in an instant, and Cash, despite the tazer on one hip and the gun on the other, stepped backwards into the hall, the smug grin slipping from his face.

"Obviously you can't just wander around the prison. You're a brute! I mean, look at you. You're threatening me now!" he said, as Brick walked him back and back.

"This ain't threatenin," Brick growled. "I'll show you threatenin."

Cash's hand drifted over the shock baton at his hip. Rocko shouldered his way between Brick and Cash, arms outstretched. "Come on, you two, don't do this."

"Shut up, Rocko. Stop protectin' everybody and act like a human being for once," Brick snapped, his fury a writhing beast which couldn't be directed or controlled. "Briggs, you were there. You saw. He wasn't kiddin, was he?"

Briggs shrank toward the door. "I...I don't...I have to go."

"Yellow-bellied bastard." Brick spat, turning his attention back to Cash. He heard Briggs escape out the door with a heavy  _clank-thunk_.

"We were drunk. I can't believe you really thought-"

Brick threw a hard punch into Cash's nose, hard enough knock him back against the cell opposite. His head smacked the bars with a satisfying thunk. Brick had just enough time to smirk before Cash drew the shock baton from his belt and drove it into his belly.

Brick screamed as pain like a tangle of biting snakes filled his gut, cramped his back, shot through his veins as fast as bullets. He ground his teeth and pushed back the curtains of darkness threatening to close around him. His animal swept up, anxious to relieve him, but he fought it off as well.

"Cash, what the fuck?" Rocko cried, holding Brick's arm to steady him.

"He hit me, babe! What was I supposed to do? Anyway, at least he didn't...oh, there he goes," Cash said, and laughed as Brick bent double to throw up a thin gruel onto the concrete floor.

"Fuck you," Rocko snapped. "Fuck you, you piece of shit. I can't believe I sucked-"

He stopped and cast a glance back at the girls. Only one girl stood there, now. Kindle had slunk off, leaving Tina in the cell doorway, watching the fight with wide, dark ringed eyes.

"You sucked my dick," Cash finished for him. His eyes were wide, too, but full of deranged joy. He grinned despite the mess Brick had made of his face, despite the question mark of blood curving from his left nostril to his lip. "And you liked it. Bet it gave you a dripping hard cock. Did your dog take care of that, after I left?"

Brick dove for him again, but Cash had the shock baton ready this time. He caught Brick in the side with it. A fresh wave of agony ripped through him, sending him stumbling helplessly to his knees, and he vomited again. Through swooping vision, he saw the bile splash Cash's shiny black shoes. He nursed a small satisfaction over it, but it was too little to hold onto. He felt himself slipping out on the tide of pain.

He was tired. He thought it might not be so bad to let the animal out. Let it walk.

Someone grabbed his hand. The pressure of fingers around his steadied him, dragged him back. It was Tina. She'd come to his side and was trying to help him to his feet, but he waved her off. "'m... I'm up..." he said, his lips flabby and uncooperative around the words.

She helped him to his feet anyway, her on one side, Rocko on the other. Cash backed away, even though Brick could barely stand.

"Coward," Brick growled.

Cash's radio crackled to life on his belt, and he held up a finger-  _wait a sec._ That insolent finger was almost enough to break the chains on Brick's animal after all, in spite of the calming hands on his arms, but then a voice hissed through the radio's static; "Code four in the mess hall, repeat, code four in the mess. Medical personnel report to the mess hall."

Brick didn't know what that meant, but Cash shot a worried look at the door Briggs had left through. Tina tugged on Brick's shirt.

"What?" he asked.

She cupped her hand around her mouth, and Brick bent close so that she should speak into his ear. "Kindle snuck out with him," she whispered. "She's gonna steal..."

But Brick had already stood back up, jerking toward the door so fast that the darkness threatened to pull him under again. He was overcome by an inexplicable, unshakable surety that the code four, whatever that meant, was about Kindle.

Cash was half out the door already, wedging through with a careful sidestep, and Brick grabbed him and tossed him back like a toy. He shouldering past into the mess hall and emerged, like he did everyday, on the upper floor walkway that wrapped around the room.

Kindle was nowhere in sight, but Brick saw Briggs at once. The guard leaned over the upper floor banister, fingers clenched tightly around the bar. When he heard the door open, he jolted and spun around with an almost cartoonish expression of horror twisting his features - thin lipped grimace and bulging eyes - and pressed himself back against the banister.

"She was on the rail," he said, as though that explained everything.

Brick didn't stop to look over the banister. He plunged down the stairs, taking them two and three at a time, fighting his way through the crowd that had gathered, thick as crows around a corpse, until he caught a glimpse of the girl through the throng of rubberneckers. Kindle was crumpled in a heap on the ground. There was no blood- not a solitary red drop. Brick focused on that and forced aside the rest; that she laid so perfectly still, and how she looked wrong, as though someone had taken and  _twisted_  her...

When Brick finally reached her and fell to his knees, he understood that he'd been fooling himself. Kindle was dead. She'd fallen badly, her neck snapped under her weight.

"Step aside," the shadowy shape of a guard said, but Brick ignored them. The girl's fingers clenched tight around something. A silver band dangled from the open end of her fist, shining under the cafeteria lights. Brick pried open her fingers, just like he'd done when he'd stolen her necklace, and palmed the object. He knew without looking that was Brigg's security chip.

Kindle's still warm fingers were nearly enough to made him throw up a third time, but he had nothing left in his stomach. He only retched weakly and felt himself slipping out on a merciful tide.

The crowd was closing in now, the shadow shapes a shuffling, shifting wall of darkness. Brick looked up. One face swam out of the fog. It was Briggs, his features still distorted by horror. Over the murmur of the shocked crowd, the guard's voice rang like a bell.

"She was walking along the rail. She surprised me. I didn't mean to- Oh, God. There was nothing I could do."

 _It was Mungojerrie and Rumpleteaser,_  Brick thought nonsensically.  _And there's nothing at all to be done about that._

Brick rose to his feet, a passenger in his own body. A laugh burbled out of him, a throaty, gutty chortle: a hungry sound. His animal had been asleep for a long time, and it was starving.


	11. Awake

Brick stood nowhere, in absolute darkness. He could feel his animal all around him, unspeakably enormous and all consuming, and although he couldn't see it, he sensed its reptilian mind and the hideous thrum of its creature's heart. The world was so noiseless that Brick could hear the steady  _bwap bwap bwap_ of his own heartbeat, and the blood shushing through his veins.

A pale disc sailed overhead, a mere silver slit in the distance, slipping and jittering across the curved void. Brick might not have spotted it if there were anything else in the sky. He thought it might be a ship, but it didn't move right for a ship. It didn't move like anything he'd ever seen. Except, maybe, the herky-jerky gait of a stalking predator. Peer, stop, peer, stop. It seemed to search for something.

Brick suddenly recognized the disc as the moon from his dreams. Then, as if could feel the direction of his thoughts, it stopped its awkward slide across the sky. It bulged toward Brick with sickening speed.

He flinched, but it stopped just short, close enough that Brick could have run his fingers across its palely luminescent surface. A single word cracked like a whip in his mind.

_GOTCHA._

The moon blinked out. Everything blinked out. Then, from somewhere far away, came a different voice, a nostalgic croon that brought tears to Brick's eyes. The singing came through the crackle of static.

_I got some friends on the other shore...and I wanna see 'em more and more...when I get to heaven, gonna live at ease...cause me and God gonna do as we please..._

Wake up, Jacob, day is a breakin'...

* * *

 _Peas in the pot and hoe-cakes a' bakin'_. He remembered, at last, the second half of that old rhyme.

He was awake. He could feel the tickle of his animal's sated snores, it curled into a lump in his belly. Everything hurt. He tried to sit up, but the pain forced a cry from him, and he laid back down. He could barely see the junction where the walls and ceiling met above, and it was too dark in the room to make out anything else.

Something stirred in the shadows. Brick jolted, then realized that he'd been lying unconscious, and anything that meant to kill him could have done it already. Whatever it was, it was seemed almost afraid to make itself known.

"Who's there?" Brick grunted.

"Babe..."

"Mordy?"

The figure laughed, a sound as soft as a summer night, and Brick realized his mistake. "Rocko. Shit. What happened?" The words were mush in his mouth, running together the way written words sometimes did.

"Thank God," Rocko breathed. "I didn't know what I was going to do if...never mind. Are you okay?"

Brick guessed what he meant. He was talking about Brick's animal. He'd never seen it before, and must have thought Brick's mind had snapped. Maybe he'd tried to talk to him, or touch him...

"Are  _you_  okay?" Brick asked.

"I'm fine. We're fine." Rocko hesitated. His barely visible figure shifted forward, and his hands enfolded one of Brick's larger, calloused ones. "All three of us."

Kindle. Brick had forgotten. His animal had allowed him to forget, at least for a moment. Maybe someday the image of the girl's broken body and glassy eyes would be one of the things he couldn't think about, one of the memories that his animal wrapped itself around, blocked from view behind its meaty side.

For now, Brick only had gaps in his memory. He couldn't recall what he'd done to Briggs - because he'd certainly done something terrible to Briggs - but he remembered Kindle lying on the mess hall floor, the security key clenched in her lifeless hand.

"The chip...I took it."

"I got it from you. Listen, I don't know what happened to you, or if you remember, but you were unstoppable. You kept the guards busy while Tina got her bombs finished. She took them down to the boiler room and blew the whole place open, right out the side of the plateau."

"So..."

"So, we're out."

All that time. All the arguing, the planning, and it was that easy. Part of Brick knew they couldn't have done it sooner. The reptilian beast who now dozed, belly swollen, was stronger than Brick could be on his own. Immune to pain. It's mind sharp enough to cut through the clouds of grief and confusion. Brick alone could never have distracted the guards long enough for Rocko to unlock the boiler room, long enough for Tina to do her work. It was his animal who'd done that, and only because of Kindle.

She'd been right from the beginning. Left to Brick, they would have rotted down in that hole for months, maybe years. But Kindle had kept her promise. She'd freed them.

"She...I didn't..." Brick rasped, not sure what he meant to say. He sensed Rocko leaning closer, still hidden by darkness, to plant a chaste kiss against Brick's clammy forehead.

"Take it easy. We're safe here, and Tina's on watch. You got pretty roughed up. After we got out of there, you just kept going. We followed you until you passed out. Not like fainting. You laid down and fell asleep, like you were just tired. Deepest I've ever seen you sleep."

 _Because it couldn't find me_ , Brick thought.  _The moon didn't know where I was for awhile._ He tried to speak, but his infuriatingly uncooperative lips wouldn't form the words. Maybe he would rest. He closed his eyes.

In the theater of his mind, he saw Kindle's tiny, tightly clenched fist.

Somewhere, Rocko was still talking. Brick barely heard him. "...found this shack...nobody here...picked clean...dragged..." Brick's mind was somewhere else, kneeling on the ground beside the dead girl, her hand in his. He saw every detail vividly: Her short, bitten fingernails. Pale palms, lighter than the backs of her hands, just like Amanda's had been.

Brick opened his eyes. The images remained, grafted onto the darkness. Rocko had stopped talking. He hummed a soothing melody and rubbed a thumb over the backs of Brick's bruised knuckles.

A loon called outside, making Brick think he'd fallen asleep again, slipped back into a dream of the Garden. But Rocko's hand remained in his, warm and real.

"What?" the younger man asked- not to Brick, but to the loon.

"It's the signal, dummy. We got company."

"Ah, damn," Rocko said, shuffling in the darkness. "Alright, hon, how do you feel? You think you can get up?"

Brick didn't know. He rose shakily to his feet, and found that in spite of the ache radiating from his muscles and a few shallow wounds, he seemed alright. He'd been badly injured enough to know what it felt like, and he didn't think he had any broken bones or embedded bullets.

He clutched Rocko's side and they fumbled their way toward the door. They staggered outside, blinking in the sudden wash of moonlight. It was sometime during Pandora's long dusk, neither full night or day, the bluffs a stretch of blue and purple shadow, the craggy dunes cold under Brick's bare feet.

Skags watched them from maybe a dozen yards away, a distance that could be easily closed by the beasts. They watched but didn't come, and Brick didn't know why. Their ragtag trio couldn't look like much of a threat. There were at least three of the skags, all hulking alphas, their eyes glowing like red stars in the darkness.

"Midget riders," Rocko whispered, as if Brick had asked aloud what he'd been wondering.

Now Brick could see it. Figures perched on the backs of the skags, the tallest no larger than Tina, but immeasurably thicker and more formidable. They wore strange, craggy armor that made them look like extensions of the skags they rode, probably crafted from the creature's hides.

The group circled, drawing closer by increments.

"Maybe they think its a trap," Rocko said, pulling Tina toward him. "It's strange to find defenseless idiots in the middle of the desert. They might think we're trying to lure people in to rob them."

The skag riders sprang forward, crossing the distance with such dizzying speed that it made Brick think of his dream moon. He lunged out in front of Rocko and Tina, braced for the assault, but, like the moon, the lead rider stopped just short.

The rider stared down at Brick. At least, Brick assumed he was looking at him. It was impossible to tell. The rider's face was hidden behind a helmet: a heavy looking, medieval mask with pronged horns on either side.

"Did you guys do that?" the rider asked, his voice like a small dog's bark. The dwarf pointed to something on the eastern horizon. Brick looked that way and saw, for the first time, the smoke rising from a distant plateau...from Lockdown Palace.

They had wandered a long way, then - Brick plunging mindlessly through the wastes, Rocko and Tina hurrying along after him - if they were so far from the prison. It was still smoldering, too, Brick noticed appreciatively.  _Some fireworks._ At least he'd probably looked like a badass, tearing away from the explosions without looking back.

"Yeah, it was us!" Tina answered, when Brick failed to do anything besides gawk at the dark swathe of smoke against the skyline. "We blew that sucka up."

The skag rider regarded her for an infinitely long moment. Brick noticed the bandoleer of grenades around his shoulder, and the shotgun, almost comically large for such a short person, holstered at his hip. But the moment passed, and the rider spoke again.

"Oh. My. God. That is epic. We were just hanging out, chilling, and we heard explosions. I was like, Whoah! Casey, did you hear that shit? Sounded like...ah, dang, what did I say? I had a good one. You remember?"

"Uh, I donno. Something about Mister Torgue."

"Like Mister Torgue getting it on with a bullymong! Yeah, never mind, that wasn't good. But it was seriously that loud. Scared the shit out of Jackie over there. Didn't it, Jax?"

"Al~ex! Don't tell them that."

Alex ignored Jackie's protest. "Anyway, that was fabulous. Those Hyperion guys are  _such_ drips. Hey, big guy. Don't be shy. You can pet my Johnson, if you want. I see you staring at it."

"Wha...?" Brick stuttered.

"That's my skag. Johnson," the rider explained, and chuckled at his own joke.

Tina stepped forward to accept the offer to pet Johnson. The skag snapped its trisected jaws, and Tina pulled away just in time, unfazed by nearly losing her arm. "That's crazy, gurl! Johnson is  _exactly_  what I was gonna name my daughter someday. Now I gotta come up with another one. Maybe...uh..."

"Gaylord," Brick said.

"Nah," Tina frowned.

"Dick?" Alex suggested.

Tina shook her head. "Don't like Dick."

"Why don't you like Dick? Dick's great!" The rider sat back, indignant.

"Ew, no way. Dicks are all veiny and gross."

"Oh, for God's sake," Rocko exclaimed. "Are you scavengers, or not? Because if you're going to rob us, please, get it over with. We don't have anything, anyway."

"Nah. I mean, we  _are_  scavengers, but we wouldn't steal from such a cute little family. Especially not a DILF like you. I'm winking, by the way." The mask was turned in the approximate direction of Brick.

Brick blushed. "Uh..."

Tina grinned up at the rider. "Are you, like, my long lost sister? Because I feel so connected to you right now."

One of the other riders, the one who shit their pants earlier, chimed in. "You three need a ride? Is your clan around here?"

Brick shook his head. "If you could point us to a station, I got a Catch-a-ride code. Hey, you guys want a car? We could get you a Lancer or something."

"They don't make Lancers anymore. And thanks, but we're good. I've got my Johnson. Jax and Case have Pecker and Dong, and that's all we need."

"Oh, they're all named after genitals. That's beautiful," Rocko said sourly. He sounded the way he always did when Brick and the girls made fart jokes.  _Only one girl_ _, now,_  Brick thought, and forced a wall down around the thought.

"The station is, like, super close. Just around that cliff. You could walk, but if you'd rather ride...Come on, big boy. I'll let you put your arms around me." The leading rider patted the skag's butt.

"We're good," Brick said.

"He don't play for your team, gurl," Tina added.

Alex laughed, but it wasn't exactly a laugh- more like a giggle. Brick finally understood that the rider was a woman, and wondered how Tina had been able to tell.

"I know, I know. I'm just so  _bad._ Well, if you're sure, we'll get out of here. Good job on those Hyperion douches." She turned to look at the riders gathered around her. "Let's ride, girls!"

They turned, all howling, midgets and skags both, and plunged into the darkening desert. Tina howled after them. Brick and Rocko joined her after a moment, and continued the chorus until the scavengers were out of sight.

"We should go," Rocko said. He was staring at something in the distance. The spindly silhouette of a drifter lurched across the dunes.

Tina yawned and grabbed Brick's hand, her fingers curling tightly around his. Even though she'd seen his animal walk, even though he'd screwed up in New Haven and again in the prison, she held Brick's hand like a vice and grabbed Rocko's with the other, and Brick's heart broke a little more.

"I wanna have a skag someday," she said, her words stretched by another yawn. "I'll ride it, an' name it...something. I donno. Dick, I guess."

They made their way toward the Catch-a-Ride station like that, Tina holding hands between Brick and Rocko, their breath puffing away in the cold night air.


	12. Highways

The next day found the three of them piled into the front seat of a bandit technical truck, Brick at the wheel, Rocko on the passenger side, and Tina wedged between them. The radio was dark in the dash, but Rocko sung along to a song in his head. "Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong..." softly, because Tina dozed against his shoulder.

They'd passed the day in distraction, with Tina perched on the fine line between entertaining and annoying, but the high sun made everyone drowsy. Brick found himself alone with this thoughts. Invariably, they drifted back to Kindle.

He remembered that her mom had been in the Crimson Lance. With the Atlas headquarters out here in the Fathoms, Brick wondered if Kindle had been on these same roads before, staring off into the same endless bleached white sky and baking in the same punishing Fathoms heat. Maybe her mom had sung, too, but along with the radio. Brick thought that if she had, Kindle would have complained about her ruining the song. He hoped her mom would have laughed and kept on singing, just like Brick would have.

"...I hear her voice in the morning hour, she calls me, radio reminds me of my home, far away," Rocko sighed, barely keeping tune. Brick wondered if Rocko even knew he was singing. It seemed as reflexive to him as breathing.

Brick veered around the rusted out shells of Lancers and picked a careful path through abandoned blockades. He watched the signs for the way to Sanctuary, which was where the Raiders had agreed to meet if anything happened to New Haven. Sanctuary, the last free city. These decaying superhighways fed out all over Pandora, so they would come to it eventually, and if they didn't find it that way, they would eventually reach T-Bone Junction and get directions there.

He drove past the off-ramps for the Underdome, Windshear Wastes and the Southern Shelf, until they came to a familiar set of signs.

Twenty miles to the Dahl Headland. Ten miles. Five.

They wouldn't be turning off in five miles. That would take them to New Haven, and there was nothing for them there. Brick remembered taking that ramp with Mordecai, returning triumphant after their victory against the Crimson Lance. He swallowed.

They'd been delirious with happiness, speeding through the Fathoms in the Lancer that would soon be Roland's, and would later be crushed by a Hyperion loader. Mordecai had laughed at all of Brick's lame jokes that day, and kept leaning across the console to touch his thigh. He'd been ruddy-cheeked and windswept and brash, and Brick had been head over heels in love with him.

"You used to live out there, right? On the east coast?" Rocko asked, startling Brick out of his thoughts.

"Yeah. We'd turn up ahead to get ho...to New Haven."

Tina stirred. She opened her eyes, rubbed the crust out of them, and sat up. "Are we there?"

"Not yet, kid. Sanctaury's a ways off still," Brick said.

"But..." Tina frowned. "But, the sign says Dahl Headland. Shouldn't we turn there?"

"We're not going to New Haven. I told you that."

"But we  _gotta_  go! I promised!" Tina cried, struggling to plant her feet on he seat, as if preparing to jump out of the car if Brick refused to make the turn. Rocko grabbed the hem of her shirt and cast a questioning look at Brick.

"Hey, hey, siddown," Brick said. "Our friends are in Sanctuary. You wanna see 'em, right?"

"But I told her I'd be there," Tina said, a frantic edge creeping into her voice.

"What are you talkin about? Who'd you tell?"

"Kindle. She said to meet her by the shipping container. It's the turn, Big! You gotta turn here!"

"Teeny...Kindle isn't gonna be there. You know that, right?"

"She's gonna be mad at me! She said I had to go straight there. She said if I didn't, she wouldn't be my friend. Please, Big..." Tina sobbed, twisted halfway out of her seat to land a flurry of punches against Brick's shoulder.

"Come on, kid. Just-"

"NO!" She turned her fists outward, started to claw him like a feral cat.

Brick didn't stop her. "She won't...she can't..." he said.

"She said she'll be there! We promised! Big, the turn is coming! Please, come on, you're gonna miss it! No!" Tina screamed, scratching him hard enough to draw blood. Rocko tried coerce her back into the seat, but she shrugged away from him. Brick faced forward and focused on the road with grim purpose.

The Dahl Headland exit swelled, then disappeared behind them.

"DAMN YOU, BIG! I HATE YOU!"

He drove a ways further, Tina screaming in his ear the whole time, until the Headlands off-ramp was half hidden behind Atlas ruins. Then he pulled the truck to a stop on the side of the road.

"Teeny."

"Shut up! I'm never talking to you again."

Brick shifted in his seat, struggling to turn in the tight space. He wrapped his arms around Tina and wordlessly held her while she wept against his shirt. Rocko was staring at him, he could feel it, but he couldn't bring himself to meet his eyes. Instead, he kissed the top of Tina's head. They stayed like that for awhile, parked aside the crumbling guardrail, the world hot and dry and perfectly silent except for the soft, snuffling sounds of Tina weeping.

"I know she's dead," she said eventually. "I'm not an idiot."

Brick tried to say something, but the words stuck in his throat. Until then, he hadn't realized that he was crying, too.


	13. Home

They rolled up to Sanctuary after a day and a half of travel. They were long Pandoran days, with endless stretches of parched sunlight and even longer nights, but they'd driven right through, not stopping to rest. Brick drove right up to gates and pulled to truck to a stop. He half expected to be turned away - they were still wearing tattered Hyperion jumpsuits - but the guard on duty recognized Brick at once.

"Well, I'll be dog! I cain't believe it," Bool exclaimed. He wore the standard uniform for the Crimson Raiders, salvaged Lance armor and a red beret. The armor might have been his from when he served with Atlas. He didn't have his helmet on, and a grin stretched across his face. His cataracts glistened, milky gray in the sunlight. "Brick! We all thought you were dead."

"What about me?" Tina asked, pushing past Rocko. "Did everyone miss me?"

Bool frowned, bushy brows furrowed. "Hm, nope. Don't think so..." When Tina's grin fell, the guard guffawed, a mad, whooping wheeze of a laugh. "Jes' kidding. Roland was so tore up about you, I reckon he'll cry when he sees you again."

"Ick."

"Who's this, now?" Bool said, nodding to Rocko.

"I'm Rocko. I, ah...was in the same prison as Brick and Tina."

"Ex-bandit, I'd guess," Bool grinned, holding out his hand. Rocko shook it.

"Yeah. Wasn't much of a choice, after Dahl pulled out. Not a lot of honest work on this planet," Rocko said. It was only half a lie.

"Dahl man, eh? I was a foreman for Dahl, way back. An' a bandit, too, so you'll get no guff from. I jes' remembered. Brick. Best get your ass to Moxxi's and see your boy. I been trying to look out for him, but...well, son, he took your death hard."

"My boy?" Brick asked, a pit opening in his stomach.

"Mordecai."

Brick swallowed and didn't look at Rocko. "Thanks for tellin me. I'll do that."

"Alright, I'll stop flappin my jaw and let you in. We'll catch up after Roland's got you settled," Bool said, and lowered the gate. It banged open with a deep  _ka-thunk,_  and Brick drove them up to a large open building, marked by a neon sign that proclaimed it was Scooter's garage. They parked in the shade.

The three of them clambered out of the car, groaning and stretching.

"Hey, Queen. You ever been to Sanctuary before?" Tina asked.

"Nah. City like this is too civilized for someone like me."

"Aw, don't worry. They let in a slob like Big, didn't they? I used to live here with my mom and dad, before...Hey! I'll give you the tour!"

"Am I invited?" Brick asked.

Tina wrinkled her nose. "No way. Rocko's a classy lady. If you tag along, he'll never let me get past first base. Anyway, didn't Bool tell you to go see Mordy?"

"Yeah, but that can wait." Brick said. He appreciated what Tina was trying to do, but he wasn't going to slink off while Rocko wandered around an unfamiliar city, even if Tina was with him.

"Go on," Rocko said, putting a hand on Brick's shoulder. This time, Brick finally did look into his eyes: one of the rare times he'd been able to since Kindle's death. "I'll be fine," he promised.

Brick smiled. Excitement cramped his gut, unbidden and unexpected, at the prospect of seeing Mordecai again. "Thanks, babe. I'll meet you guys soon."

They kissed - just a light, chaste smack on the lips, but Tina still feigned a retch - and Brick departed for Moxxi's bar. It was one of the few locations he remembered from his infrequent visits to Sanctuary. He rounded a corner, then another, feeling like he was being pulled by an invisible force, up a low rise of stairs, faster and faster, until he was nearly running. The neon sign, Moxxxi's, blinked in time with his pounding heart.

He stepped through the open doorway, squinting to make out the dim interior. When his eyes adjusted, he saw the ancient one-armed bandit slot machines against the left wall, currently unmanned. Booths lined the opposite wall. A few seasoned alcoholics huddled there to drink, but none of them were very talkative. It was, after all, barely past noon.

Only one person sat at the bar. His back was turned, and Brick could only see the man's slender, slouched frame, his narrow ass perched all the way forward on the stool. With his head bowed, Mordecai's dreads stuck up like the crest of a bird. An actual bird perched on his shoulder, roosting in the folds of his long red scarf. It was the first time Brick could remember being so happy to see Bloodwing.

Although he'd practically flown all the way to the bar, Brick found that he couldn't move from the doorway. He couldn't even speak.

Moxxi looked up from the glass she was cleaning and locked eyes with him. She grinned, shook Mordecai's shoulder and pointed to the doorway where Brick stood, saying something that he couldn't hear over the clanging catcalls of the slot machines. Mordecai turned around, beer still clutched in his hand, looking at Brick from behind his opaque goggles. He glanced down at his beer, then turned back to Moxxi.

She made an exasperated gesture and took the bottle from him. She pointed at Brick again. Loud enough to hear, she said, "Go on. I see him too."

Mordecai clumsily dismounted the stool and staggered over to Brick. The stench of booze came off him in waves. He reached Brick and stopped, looking straight forward instead of up at the taller man's face, his mouth set in a grim line. He stuck out his hand awkwardly.

"Hey," Brick finally managed. "What, uh...whaddya want?"

"'m tryin to shake your hand," Mordecai said, his words slurred nearly past coherence, but Brick had heard him drunk often enough to understand. He took the offered hand and shook it, but Mordecai didn't let go after. He squeezed tightly, staring down at their clasped palms like he still couldn't believe it.

"I was captured. Hyperion took over the old Lockdown Palace, I guess, 'cos that's where they put me, and I-"

"We have to go to my apartment," Mordecai interrupted.

"Huh? Why?"

"I got something for you."

Brick frowned. Mordecai still held him, clenching so hard that it made the rods in the back of his hand ache. "I dunno. I wasn't the only one who broke out. Tina, and, uh, another guy. They're probly waiting for me, and I ain't seen everyone else yet-"

"Oh, come on," Mordecai said. He finally looked up at Brick. His eyes remained hidden behind his goggles, but he grinned, and Brick's heart skipped a beat to see it. "Play hooky with me. I'll tell Roland it was my fault if he tries to be a little pissbaby."

Brick snorted. "I thought you and Roland were besties." He thought Mordecai might be mad, but the other man only grinned wider.

"You hold a grudge like a woman. Seriously, stop bitching and come with me. You know you're gonna."

Brick resigned with a shrug. Mordecai dragged him out the door, not once letting go of his hand, and led him upstairs to a nearby apartment. He fumbled a key out of his pocket, nearly dropped it, and jammed it into the lock with trembling fingers. Bloodwing regarded Brick cooly from her roost on Mordecai's shoulder. She'd never liked sharing her master, and she hadn't changed her mind.

After a good amount of cursing and jiggling, Mordecai managed to unlock the door and drag Brick into the dark, pleasantly cool apartment. Empty bottles clanked around their feet.

"You been drinkin too much," Brick said. It was a statement, not a question, but Mordecai shook his head.

"Nah. I just don't clean."

That was true, but Brick knew it was more than that. He could tell by the way his friend had staggered across the bar, breath stinking like a brewery, while the sun was barely halfway across the sky.

Mordecai shut the door, and Bloodwing flapped away to roost on the couch's slumped back. The blinds were flung open in the apartment's dinky living room and even dinkier kitchen, but he didn't bother to draw them before he launched himself at Brick, arms sweeping up to wrap around the taller man's shoulders, their mouths crushing together - more of an assault than a kiss - and Brick pressed back against his friend's chapped lips.

Like he might have guessed, Mordecai's mouth tasted like the beer he'd been drinking, acrid and dry, but it didn't matter. Their kiss was a surprisingly bestial pleasure, like scratching a deep itch. Brick's arms remembered instinctively how to hold Mordecai's skinny body.

When they parted, Brick smiled dreamily. "Issat what you wanted to give me?"

"Uh..." Mordecai said, sounding distracted. "No. It's...fuck. I missed you, you bastard. Why'd it take you so long? Why'd you have to make me think..." He looked away.

"Sorry."

Mordecai didn't reply. Brick reached up to cup his friend's face with both hands and pushed his goggles up with his thumbs. When Mordecai realized what he was doing, he tried to shove him back, but Brick wouldn't be budged. When Mordecai's goggles slipped up to his forehead, tears tumbled free down his cheeks, leaving dark streaks in their wake.

"Damnit, get offa me! Why don't you get out of here? This isn't real. I'm gonna wake up, and you'll still be dead, so don't draw it out."

"I ain't dead, Mordy. I swear. I tried to tell you. I got captured."

Mordecai looked up at him. "You're really here?"

"Really." Brick pushed the goggles the rest of the way up over Mordecai's head and tossed them aside, reached back to unknot the bandanna and unwind the hairband to free the other man's dreads. His hair fell loose around his shoulders.

"Fuck, though. Now I feel like an asshole," Mordecai said, swatting Brick away. He wiped his eyes with the back of one gaunt wrist.

"Why?"

"Because I'm crying like a baby shitting peach pits."

Brick laughed. "Like  _what_?"

"It's something Bool says. His weird expressions stick with me. Hey, I gotta give you something, okay?"

"Kay. But I wanna give you something first."

Mordecai's eyes narrowed. "What is it?" he asked suspiciously, like he expected Brick to fart in his hand or something.

But Brick grabbed the shorter man's beard where it was thickest and pulled him into another kiss, ignoring his startled yelp. "Bedroom," he growled.

"Uh..."

Mordecai hesitated, probably remembering all the old deals they'd made with themselves: No kissing, no stripping together at home, no names during sex, no doing it with the lights on, and no declarations of love. They'd managed to break nearly all of them already. "Okay. Come on," he said at last. He led Brick through a doorway, picking their way through the litter of bottles on the ground.

"Siddown," Brick demanded, pushing Mordecai toward to bed.

He obeyed, perching awkwardly on the edge of the mattress. The skin around his eyes was paler where his goggles usually sat, and Brick detected the faint blush there before it crept across the rest of his face.

"What're ya doing? We can't just...you know..."

Brick ignored his halfhearted protests and sunk to his knees, tugging and twisting Mordecai's belt open and pulling down his zipper, then struggled his pants all the way off before he could react.

"Hey!" he squawked, pulling his knees together and slouching defensively. "Geez. Warn a guy."

"What're you scared of? We used to do this all the time."

"Not in the light," Mordecai said, citing one of the few rules they hadn't broken.

Brick scoffed. "First time for everything."

Mordecai didn't argue. Brick wasn't sure why he had to do this, but dumb canid instinct drove him, an urge to ease pain with snuffling kisses and blunt physically. He looked up at Mordecai, studying him by the sunlight that filtered through the window. The curved lines around his mouth and eyes had deepened since Brick last saw him, and he looked vulnerable this way, legs naked and shivering, knees pressed together. The sight filled Brick with a queer tenderness. He committed the image to memory, to take out and mull over when he needed it.

He pressed his lips to the brown blade of one knee, then the other. Mordecai allowed him to push his legs apart, and Brick smooched a trail of pushy, slobbery kisses up his inner thighs. Mordecai shivered, skin rippled by gooseflesh under the flat of Brick's tongue. The larger man's hands roved over his outer thighs, hips and ass, to squeeze and knead, appreciating the muscles that flexed under his palms. How skinny and birdlike Mordecai felt compared to Rocko; how angular and awkward, his butt small enough to fit completely in both of Brick's palms.

But Brick's cock was painfully hard in his pants, drooling a wet spot against the fabric. He pressed his lips to the innermost part of Mordecai's thigh.

"Stop teasin," Mordecai mumbled, rubbing a shaky hand across his bearded jaw.

Brick snorted and planted a nip against that sensitive place, then replaced it with a lingering, suckling kiss that made Mordecai gasp, and, when he'd recovered his faculties, flick Brick in the ear.

"Okay, okay," Brick said, grinning into the crook of Mordecai's groin. "Thought you'd be more grateful."

"Well, that depends on how you do," Mordecai cheeked, earning a slightly harder bite from the brute who nuzzled between his legs.

But Brick did stop teasing, and finally put his mouth where Mordecai wanted it. While he went down on his friend, he considered his smell: sour sweat, stale beer and smoke, and the underlying 'Mordecai' smell of him, indescribable, as unique as a thumbprint. That smell drove him wild, drove him to rock on his heels and thrust the tented crotch of his pants against his own wrist, humping like a dog, panting around Mordecai's cock.

What his technique lacked in polish, he made up for with enthusiasm, swallowing Mordecai's length to the hilt again and again, deep enough to make his nose run and bring tears to his eyes. He probably looked like a mess, but he wasn't thinking about that. Brick thought about nothing, lost in the sensation of flesh slicking in and out of his mouth.

"Please..." Mordecai groaned, hands braced against Brick's shoulders. "Oh, fuck.  _Hijole,_ Brick..!"

That name, that broken rule - which Mordecai had created and was the most frequent violator of - was too much for Brick, and his mind glassed over as he came, spurting against the taut fabric of his pants like a teenager after too much fumbling and kissing.

He voiced his orgasm with a low groan muffled around Mordecai's cock. He didn't seem to notice, small favors, so Brick continued to blow him until he came, too, a couple minutes later and without warning.

With his mind cleared by rubbing out against his wrist, Brick considered, as Mordecai came down his throat, that the lack of warning was no accident. Mordecai wanted to claim him. With that last hard rut and spurt, he sent a message- you're mine, alive and here and mine...

Brick swallowed. He didn't get up, but instead laid his flushed face against Mordecai's thigh. Eyes closed, tears drying on his cheeks, he listened to his friend's ragged gasps grow quieter as he caught his breath. Mordecai leaned over him, fingers tracing lazy circles over Brick's back and neck.

"'ey...you 'member when we first met? On the bus?" Mordecai said, in a sleepy mumble which even Brick barely understood.

"Yeah?"

"Did I ever tell you...Nah. N'ver mind."

"What? You gotta tell me now."

"Just, what I thought when I first saw you."

"You told me. You thought I looked dumb. Like a...what was it?  _Idiota?_  Somethin."

Mordecai loosed a low, boozy chuckle. "Yeah. That too. But I also thought you were so fucking  _hot_. Muscles, scars-"

"Come on, you're full of shit," Brick said, chuckling too. "You don't hafta butter me up. I already blew ya."

Mordecai growled. "Why would I lie? Take the damn compliment!"

"I thought you were straight, though."

"I never said that. I mean, I'd never been with a guy. I tried, couple a' times, but I was no good at picking up the signals. Got my goggles broke one time and my nose broke another, and I stopped trying. If you couldn't guess, I go after a certain kind of guy." Brick's arms were wrapped around Mordecai's waist, and the smaller man reached down to squeeze his bicep for emphasis.

"How come you never said anything?"

"Are you even listening,  _amigo?_  You could'a ripped my head off, easy. I wasn't gonna risk it. I'm surprised you didn't notice me staring at you on the bus. The goggles are good for hiding that, though."

"So that's what the goggles are for? Checkin out dudes?"

"Oh, shaddup,  _Baboso._ Don't be an asshole. You think its easy for me to say this stuff?"

"Sorry." Brick didn't know why Mordecai was telling him any of this, but he listened without interruption as he continued, adding only the punctuation of soft, lazy kisses against Mordecai's belly and hips.

"When we got of the bus, I thought I was never gonna see you again. But then those bandits attacked Fyrestone. It was like..." Mordecai paused. "Like a miracle. Well, that's a shitty thing to say, but that's how it felt. All four of us were there, but you killed at least half the raiders with that rusty piece of shit shotty. Holy shit. Watching you fight...beautiful." He snorted. "'m glad I'm piss drunk, or this'd be embarrassing."

"I like it."

"Well, sure, I'm kissing  _your_  ass. Anyway, we stayed with Doc Zed, an' we were all up half the night drinking and talking. Remember? I tried to drink my mind offa you. But when you went out back to take a piss, I followed. I was thinking...well, I wasn't really thinking." Mordecai paused to clear his throat. "I was, uh...gonna try to jerk you off."

Brick blinked. "What?"

"I was drunk, okay! And I couldn't stop thinking about coming up behind you while your fly was down, and, shit, I don't know. It wasn't a good plan."

"Why'd you change your mind?" Brick asked. He probably would have let Mordecai do it. Even though his fucked up childhood had made him wary of what his momma referred to as 'going down to the Garden', he was still a guy, still had urges, and he'd sized up Mordecai briefly and liked what he saw.

"It's stupid. I was coming up behind you while you were pissing, and when I got closer, I could hear you singing. I don't remember the song now, but I knew it then, and you were getting most of the words wrong. Like, seriously. Almost all the words."

Brick frowned. "An' you decided I was too dumb for you?"

"No," Mordecai said, sounding surprised. "It wasn't that. You were just...really cute. I thought it wasn't worth fucking up the chance to be friends with you. But I did, uh...think about you. That night. Hey, would you get up here, already?"

Brick's knees ached as he clambered up on the bed to join Mordecai. His dick, hard again after a record breakingly short refractory period, rubbed uncomfortably against the damp spot where he'd finished in his pants. Mordecai wrapped an arm around Brick's waist, fingers teasing under the hem of his shirt. "I don't talk about this kind of stuff a lot. But I had to...tell you something. You know?"

Brick kissed the shorter man's sweaty temple. "Yeah."

Mordecai fished around under his pillow, and Brick thought he was looking for a pack of cigarettes, but when his hand reemerged, he was holding something that made Brick's heart lurch.

"My necklace," Brick finally managed to say, as Mordecai reached out to slip the chain over his head. "You found it."

"It was all we could find in the rubble. And, uhm..."

Brick's hand came up automatically to touch the trinkets on the necklace, and he found them intact: the key, Pris's paw, and...

Tears sprung to his eyes. "Dusty."

"Thought you might want that, if...If we were wrong. If you came back. I asked Zed to do it. His only condition was that he get to keep the body, and I figured you wouldn't mind-" When Brick's eyes snapped open, he laughed. "Just kidding. Zed removed the paw, but we buried the rest of him."

Brick turned the paw over and over, running his thumb over the bumps of the pawpads. Dusty had been a small pup. His brown paw was only about half the size of Priscilla's white one. He wanted to thank Mordecai, but nothing seemed like enough to express the depth of his gratitude, and a hot lump of emotion swelled his throat shut.

He tried force words past it, but a sob burst from his mouth instead. Mordecai's arms came up to wrap around his shoulders. Brick nuzzled into the crook of the smaller man's neck and cried, leaving a damp patch of tears and spit against his Mordecai's skin, but if he minded, he didn't say.

When he'd wept dry, he snuffled an apology.

"You're fine. I'm sorry I didn't listen to you earlier, when you tried to tell me where you've been. I thought I was dreaming. But I'll listen now," Mordecai said.

So Brick told him everything, starting at the botched escape from New Haven - Andy's head popped like a zit, Dusty's crumpled corpse - to the prison, and the surrogate family he'd found there. He didn't elaborate much about Rocko, but he didn't lie, either. He snuck a look at Mordecai's face when he told him that part. His expression didn't change, but Brick went on hurriedly anyway, to their tenuous relationship with the guards, and, ultimately, Kindle's death.

After he finished talking, crying a little again (like a baby shitting peach pits, according to Bool) Mordecai kissed the top of his head. "That sucks. Sorry about the girl."

"You're not mad?"

"Why would I be mad?"

"About Rocko."

"Nah. You can do whatever you want. We're not gay married."

Brick grunted. "That's stupid. Gay married. You think I'm gonna get down on one knee someday and say, hey, Mordy, will you gay marry me? I wanna be your gay husband for the rest of my gay life."

To Brick's surprise, Mordecai turned increasingly deep shades of red. "Wh-what? What're you talking about?"

"You don't get gay married. You just get married."

"Oh," Mordecai said. "Whatever. I'm not getting any kind of married."

"Not even if I ask real nice?"

Mordecai tugged Brick's ear hard enough to hurt. "Quit it. Anyway, I don't think your new boyfriend would be too happy if you eloped with me."

"If we gay eloped?"

Brick thought Mordecai might laugh at that, but he didn't. Their fingers found each other's and intertwined. They laid together for awhile, not talking, watching the ceiling fan lazily push air around above them and listening to Bloodwing's barely perceptible snores.

"We should go. Everyone will wanna see you," Mordecai said. The bed creaked as he sat up, stretched, and popped his back. "What the hell did you do with my pants?"

Brick helped him look and found them crumpled under the bed. He watched unhappily as Mordecai pulled them on.

"What?" he snapped when he caught Brick staring.

"It ain't gonna be like this, will it?"

Mordecai hesitated, but the answer was already in his face. "I don't know, Brick. It's complicated."

But he did know, and Brick knew it, too. He touched the totems on his necklace. He wondered about the other key, the twin to his own. Now, like the girl who used to wear it, it was lost. That wasn't the only reason for Brick's creeping dread. He sensed the thing that hunted him in the Fathoms, the moon, hunting him still. He could feel the weight of its mind, waiting and watching, a predator that gauged him carefully.

Brick tried to shake off the thought, pulling on the clothes that Mordecai brought him. They were his, salvaged from his apartment in New Haven. Like the necklace, Mordecai had saved them: 'just in case'.


	14. Catching Up

Brick was halfway to the door when Mordecai grabbed him by the wrist.

"Wanna go again?" Mordecai asked, a smile shyly curling one corner of his lip, hands already working to unbuckle his own belt.

Brick chuckled - Yeah, he'd love to - and stripped out of his clothes twice as fast as he'd put them on. They kissed, only breaking the lock of their mouths to pull their shirts up over their heads.

They shared a hard, fast fuck on the living room floor, Mordecai bent over the seat of the couch with Brick kneeling behind him. They screwed in a perfect square of afternoon sunlight. This time, Brick laid his own claim, an unspoken chorus;  _mine, mine, mine,_ with every grunt and slap of flesh. When he pulled out to spurt across Mordecai's back, it was with a growl of territorial satisfaction.

Cleaned up and clothed again, Brick caught Mordecai's hand as it closed around the doorknob. He turned him aroung and pinned him against the door, and caught his mouth in a long, languorous kiss, until Mordecai's traitorous fingers turned the knob and the door swung outward, spilling them into the glaring sunlight.

"Jerk," Brick muttered.

"Can't spend all day rubbing our dicks together," Mordecai said as he started down the stairs.

Brick thought he could have, if Mordecai would let him. But Rocko and Tina were out there, and presumably Roland and Lilith—he hadn't asked about them—and Brick couldn't think of any believable excuse for hiding out in Mordecai's apartment all afternoon. As it was, an hour had already slipped by.

"Om nom nom nom nom!" cried a joyous, familiar voice from Moxxi's bar.

"You don't say om nom nom. It's just a sound for eating," Rocko explained.

"Yeah, I know. I'm eating."

"No, I mean, eating sounds like that already."

"What, like chewing? It don't sound like that when I chew, gurl! It sounds like...here, lemme show you."

By now, Brick and Mordecai were close enough to Moxxxi's open door to see the two figures sitting at the bar beyond, and Tina shoving a fistful of olives into her mouth. She chewed them with relish, so loudly that Brick could hear it from the doorway. It actually did sound a little like 'om nom nom'.

"That's lovely," Rocko said, hiding his face behind one palm. His other hand was being scrutinized by Moxxi. His arm was flecked with dry blood to the elbow, and Moxxi looked over a long, infected cut on his wrist that Brick hadn't noticed before.

"Poor baby," she crooned. "I should take you in back, get you cleaned up."

"I'm fine, but thank yo-"

"Hey!" Tina cried when she spotted Brick. Bits of olive spilled from her overstuffed mouth.

"Hey, kid," he said, stepping into the doorway. The inside of the bar was dark, but not peaceful like Mordecai's apartment had been. This darkness was splashed with neon, spangled by the clatter of slot machines, and the solid thunk of darts into a dartboard. He strolled over to stand between Rocko and Tina at the bar. Mordecai followed and slid into the stool beside Rocko.

"How'd this happen?" Brick asked, stealing Rocko's hand from Moxxi to inspect the wound.

"Snagged it on something when we broke out. I didn't want to worry you."

Brick frowned, thumbing the inflammation around the cut. "You gotta get this looked at. I can take you to Zed." He paused, looked up at Moxxi. "Uh, Zed made it, right? Out of New Haven?"

She was already nodding. "He's fine. I'm sure Mordecai's told you, but Lilith and Roland made it, too. The only Raiders missing after the attack were private Andy and officer Knowles. And you, of course."

"Andy's dead," Brick said flatly.

Mordecai answered before Moxxi could. "Roland told us, and we found his body. Knowles, too. We looked for you for ages, but...Hey, Mox. Why don't you get your nose out of the new guy's crotch and get me a beer, huh?"

Moxxi, who had been leaning over the counter and staring dreamily at Rocko, stood up to glare at Mordecai. "Don't be jealous, Sug. You had your chance."

Mordecai growled. "'m not jealous. Just thirsty."

Brick realized he was still fussing over Rocko's injury, and he returned his arm with an apologetic grin. "Sorry."

"It's fine. I've had worse," Rocko said, though he winced as he pulled the ragged sleeve of his jumpsuit down to hide the gash.

"My arm got sliced clean off by a constructor, once," Mordecai said, pushing up his short sleeve to reveal the ring of lighter skin around his bicep. "That  _baboso_  patched me up while the loaders were still shooting at us."

Rocko  _oohed_  over the scar, touching it with curious fingers. "Wow, that's wild. I'm glad Brick was able to put you back together. And he didn't sew it on backwards or anything!"

"Hey," Brick said.

"He did alright," Mordecai said, eyes flicking up to meet Brick's. It was the closest thing to a thank-you Brick had ever gotten for the deed.

Moxxi plunked down a bottle of beer in front Mordecai and gently set another down for Rocko. "Eleven creds," she barked at the sniper.

"What? Why do I gotta pay, when pretty boy drinks on the house?"

Moxxi flipped him the bird. "Because you're an asshole, that's why. And Rocko cant pay. He's been in prison."

"I'm sorry. I'll pay you back later, I promise," Rocko said.

"Oh, well, I can think of a few  _other_  ways you can pay your tab..." she purred.

"I...uh..." He wrapped am arm around Brick's waist, half pulling him into his lap; it was a ridiculous, possessive gesture that made Brick smile in spite of himself. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mordecai glance quickly away.

"Hey, now, ease off him," Brick grunted. "I ain't showed him around yet, I don't want your bite marks all over him when he meets everyone."

Moxxi winked. "I'm just teasing, sug. Tina told me."

"Told ya what?" Brick asked.

"That Queen is your boyfriend," Tina said through another mouthful of olives.

Brick turned to scold her, but was distracted by enormous jar of maraschino cherries she held in her lap. She struggled to remove the lid, her whole body twisting with the effort, her face turning pink. Brick took it from her and twisted the cap. It came loose with a breathy pop, and he handed her the open jar. When he turned back to the bar, Mordecai was gone. Brick saw his back only briefly as he slipped out the door.

"Pshhh, whatever. I loosened it," Tina said, fishing around in the liquid. "Hey, Moxxi, wanna see a trick?"

"Sure, sweetie."

Tina popped one of the cherries, stem and all, into her mouth. She held up one finger- wait- while she mulled it around for awhile. She stuck out her tongue, and on it sat the stem, knotted. "Ta-da," she slurred.

"Cute. Let me show you one." Moxxi tossed back three cherries. Brick had to look away from her mouth as she masticated them, her made-up lips working, cheeks bulging. It felt weird to watch. Rocko stared at her, transfixed, and Brick felt an absurd pang of jealousy.

After a long, uncomfortable moment, Moxxi produced the stems. She'd used her tongue to twist them into a the shape of a heart.

"WHOOOOAAAAH! Babum, babum, babum," Tina cried, hand patting her own flat chest to mime her pounding heart. "What're you doing later, gurl?"

Moxxi spit the knotted stems into her palm and handed it to Tina, who took it. "Maybe when you're older."

Tina put the twist around her finger like a ring. "Ima hold you to that. Big, Big, hey, Big? Didja hear that? I got a date with  _Moxxi_!"

"That's great, Teeny."

"Brick! You asshole!" said a voice from the other doorway, the front entrance. Brick turned to see Lilith running toward him.

He extracted himself from Rocko's arm and rushed to meet her. She slowed just before she reached him and leaped into his arms. He swung her around in his massive, tight embrace, laughing, both of them laughing. At last he set her down on her toes, and she turned on him like a cat, striking him across the cheek with a lightning fast slap.

"Bool had to tell me you were here!"

"Oh," Brick said.

"Oh? That's all you have to say?" Lilith was crying, tears cutting glassy ribbons down her cheeks, neon pink in the light from the bar sign.

"I missed ya," he added.

"That's better," she said, snuffling.

"Hey, Soldier," Roland said. He stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the bright sunlight. He stepped forward and held out his hand to Brick. Brick took it and pulled the Raider commander into a hug, instead—a manly, back slapping bearhug—and released him with a flourish.

"Didn't mean to go AWOL. I got captured by Hyperion."

"I'll brief you about it later," Roland said. Lilith elbowed him. "Uh, when you're ready, of course."

"Sure. Hey, Rocko, get over here. I want you to meet my friends." Rocko got up and joined Brick, one arm drifting up to wrap around his waist again, making the larger man blush. "Heh...uh. Rocko, this is Lil and Roland, commanders of the Crimson Raiders. And, guys, this is Rocko. I met him in prison. He's-"

"An ex-bandit," Rocko said quickly. "Nice to meet you. If you want me to leave, I understand."

Before Roland could respond, Brick did. "That wasn't what I was gonna say. I was gonna say, my boyfriend.

"Awww. Nice to meet you too, Rocko," Lilith said, and hugged him.

Roland gawped. "Uh...me too. I mean, I'm, uh, it's good to meet you," he sputtered. He shook Rocko's hand when it was offered, but stared at Brick the whole time, looking as if he'd just found out that he was some kind of alien. If he'd had any opinion on Rocko being an ex-bandit, they were replaced by surprise over his relationship with Brick.

Lilith excused herself to greet Tina, and Roland followed, casting a last, weird look over his shoulder at Brick.

"Guess he didn't know what team you play for?" Rocko asked, pulling Brick into a booth to wait for Tina and the Raiders.

Brick snorted. "Roland's a self-absorbed asshole. He wouldn't have known if I made out with a dude right in front of his dumb face," he grunted.

"But he's your friend?"

"Yep. One of my best friends."

Rocko fell silent. He drummed his fingers on the table and said, without looking up at Brick, "You were gone for awhile."

"Yeah," Brick said.

"And that was Mordy, right?"

Brick nodded. "Mordecai."

"Ah."

Brick wanted to say something else, to tell Rocko that it wasn't like that, not anymore, but he couldn't force the words out of his mouth. It would have been a lie, and he was never much good at lying.

He didn't have to. As usual, Rocko didn't demand it, only leaned over to kiss Brick on his square, stubbly jaw. When he tried to sit back, Brick hooked a hand around the back of his neck and dragged him into a deeper kiss.

"Hey, we're- Oh! Sorry," Roland said, appearing suddenly around the back of the booth. He averted his eyes, although Brick had stopped kissing Rocko immediately. "We were gonna head back now."

"Cool. You wan' us along?

Of course. If you want, you can stay at HQ. We've got beds. Just bunks, though."

Brick shrugged. "It's what we're used to."

They meant to leave right away, but Lilith kept putting it off. She wanted to drink together, like old times (although it couldn't be, Brick thought, since Mordecai had slunk off. He wouldn't be around to follow Brick out back when he went out to piss) and there was a toast by Tina, a toast by Lilith, and even a toast by Roland after he'd had enough beers. His was a long, slurred speech about brotherhood and the Raiders, which he ended with a belch.

By the time the five of them staggered out of the bar—except for Tina, who skipped ahead of them; she wouldn't have a hangover the next morning, either, the brat—the sun was setting over the tops of the buildings, pushing long shadows across the street.


	15. No Free City

Two weeks later, Brick padded through the Raider HQ, enjoying the early morning solitude. He and Mordecai were the only people in the HQ. Everyone else had left early for a predawn march and firearms training in the wasteland, which Brick had opted out of with a sleepy snuggle into his bunk and a raised middle finger. He'd only gotten up when Mordecai slouched upstairs, swearing and kicking things, complaining that Roland had asked him to come over and take a look at a buggy shield.

 _Tol' him to just buy a new one, but he's such a stubborn tacano..._ the scrawny, bad tempered sniper had grumbled, and Brick had lumbered downstairs to start coffee. He poured a cup now—for Mordecai, because he didn't drink the stuff himself—and left out the cream and sugar, the way he remembered his friend liking it. He carried the steaming, bitter brew upstairs. He heard Mordecai's muttered cursing before he saw him.

Buttery sunlight fell through the open balcony archway and illuminated the Raider war room: the cluttered central table, the safe that took up the entire back wall, and the bunks against the adjacent walls, including the rumpled nest that Brick had dragged himself out of. Mordecai hunched over the large table, and Brick's heart swelled at the sight of him. He was sloppy in his sweatpants and tanktop, bare footed, dreads gathered in a loose ponytail at the base of his neck. Bloodwing perched nearby. She regarded Brick with one suspicious eye when he entered the room.

Brick strolled up behind Mordecai, looking over the parts strewn across the table- the shell of the shield, screws, flat bits, twisty bits, tiny cylinders. It was all junk to him, but Mordecai pored over it raptly, so engaged in in his work that he didn't react when Brick bent over to set the mug on the table.

Instead of straightening up, Brick turned to nuzzle Mordecai's neck and breathe a doggish huff into his ear. Like a person might do to a pestering dog, Mordecai swatted him away, not lifting his eyes from his work.

"Thanks," he grunted. "You didn't have to."

"I figured it'd be nice, since you came in so early."

Mordecai shrugged. "Didn't sleep."

"How come?"

"Same shit as usual. Nightmares."

"You know, if you ever need a warm body in your bed, I can sleep over."

"Aren't you keeping Rocko warm these days?"

Brick grunted noncommittally and laid his hands on Mordecai's shoulders, fingers sliding under the straps of his shirt to massage the naked brown skin underneath.

"Would you knock it off?" Mordecai snapped.

Brick pulled his hands away. "Fine, damn. It's just, everyone left for that training thing."

"So?"

"I thought we could...you know."

"You thought wrong," Mordecai said. His eyes remained fixed on his work, but Brick noticed that he was just screwing and unscrewing the same piece.

"Come on, Mordy. Why're you bein like this? We did it when I got back."

"That...I was drunk."

"You're drunk now," Brick said. "You're always drunk."

"Get the hell out of here, Brick. You cant come sniffing around me every time your boyfriend is away."

"It ain't like that..." Brick said, frowning. The conversation had gone south so quickly, he couldn't catch up. "I wanna be with you."

"Well, I don't want to be with you. I just want to be left alone. You know how to do that, right? How to leave?"

"That's not fair. I didn't mean to go."

But Mordecai ignored him, still turning the screwdriver over and over, working on that same screw. Brick's eyes settled on the untouched coffee, at the last wisps of steam wafting from the mug as it cooled.

"Mordy," he said.

"What?"

"I love you."

Mordecai froze. The screwdriver finally stopped twisting through his fingers. An unspeakably long stretch of seconds passed in silence.

"Go away, Brick. I'm busy."

"Fine," Brick said. A strange feeling settled through him, something like the injection he'd gotten after Mordecai shot him all those years ago- a kind of slow spreading numbness.

"And take this," Mordecai added, gesturing toward the mug. "I don't drink coffee anymore." Brick could hear the unspoken addition the that statement.  _You would know, if you'd been here._

All at once, the numbness cleared, replaced by a white hot star of anger. Brick swept the mug off the table. It clunked on the ground and spilled a wash of cooling coffee across the floor. Mordecai whirled around to look at Brick, but he was already gone, stormed out the door and stomping down the stairs.

He stopped and waited briefly at the bottom of the steps for Mordecai to call down after him, but he didn't.

So Brick crossed the room and plunged out of the headquarters, pausing long enough to snag his energy shield off the counter and clip it onto his belt. Once outside, he didn't know where to go. He'd been staying in the HQ for the past couple weeks and had no apartment to go home to. His feet carried him across the town square, toward the front gates, and he decided to see if he knew the guard on duty. Maybe he could goad whoever it was into taking potshots at distant bullymongs. They might even drag a few of the creatures into a brawl, a good blood and guts skirmish. The thought nearly brought a smile to his face.

Before he made it across the square, though, a commotion came from the direction of Scooter's garage. People were shouting. One voice rose above the others, one that Brick recognized but couldn't place.

"Please, you've got to believe me! You got it wrong! I never-"

"Shut up," snapped Lilith's voice. "We know everything."

The group of Raiders rounded the corner. Brick saw Roland, Lilith and Rocko among them, and a few other young recruits, forcing a cuffed prisoner along with them. Roland held one of the man's arms and Lilith held the other. Suddenly, Brick knew where he'd heard that voice. It was Shep, a man who'd helped them take out the bandit lord Sledge a few years back.

He begged, turning first to Lilith and then to Roland, but neither commander would return his gaze. "Whoever told you that was lying! Trying to save their own skin. I swear! God, please don't kill me, I'm not..."

"What's goin on?" Brick asked.

"Oh, shit," Lilith muttered.

"It's nothing. Take over at the guard post, alright? Bool's out there, and he needs a break," Roland said, trying to push past.

Brick scoffed. "Don't look like nothin. Why you dragging Shep in like a prisoner?"

"They got the wrong guy!" Shep howled. "I didn't do  _nothing,_ I didn't-"

"Shuddup. I wasn't askin you," Brick said.

Lilith stopped to look at Roland with a question on her face. Whatever answer she found made her give a curt nod, then turn back to Brick. "He was hiding out in a shack in the valley. We stumbled on him during the march."

"So? What'd he do?"

She hesitated, but not for long. "Brick...Shep's the one who sold us out to Hyperion. He told them where to find New Haven."

Brick looked from her to the prisoner, feeling slow, real slow. The numbness crept back, too. It locked his limbs and making his fingers tingle: a queasy, electric crackle, like static across his skin.

"You...you?" he asked Shep, taking one achingly sluggish step toward the cowering prisoner. Roland tried to get between them, but Brick barely registered it. He pushed the Raider commander aside.

"No," Shep insisted. "I was framed!"

Brick ignored his pleas. He grabbed Shep by the hair and wrenched him forward. His animal coiled through him—not controlling his body, not yet—but watching, weighing.

"Lilith wouldn't lie," Brick snarled.

"Brick, stop," Lilith said, touching his arm. He could barely feel her fingers through the electricity that gripped him. "We're going to question him. We  _will_  hurt him, don't worry. But not here."

Brick released his grip on Shep's hair. The prisoner stumbled back, where he was caught by Roland.

A coy intuition came over Brick. A voice whispered to him, not his own or his animal's, but seemingly a third voice, so foreign that it might have come from the jagged jaws of a deep sea fish. This new voice was clever, and Brick let it speak.

"Sounds good, Lil. Sounds real good. What you think, Shep? Wanna be tortured? Electrodes on your boys, glass under your nails...What's that other thing called? The thing with the hammer? Hobbling? Where they take a board and put it between your ankles, and then-" Brick mimed swinging a hammer, but he swung hard, more like a golf club. Shep flinched. "Or you can 'fess up now. You won't walk away, but, let's be honest, you knew that wasn't an option. Tell me everything, and I'll kill you here. Nice an' easy," Brick said, palms spread.

Roland shook his head. "No, you won't..." he started, but Lilith caught his gaze. He closed his mouth.

Shep had been writhing, twisting, more frantic than ever, but as Brick's words sunk in, slow realization dawned across his face. The features that had been twisted by fear began to relax, like a sheet being smoothed.

"I did it," he said, almost dreamily. "I wanted the creds, so I answered all the man's questions. He betrayed me. Didn't get paid, not a single cred."

"You son of a bitch," Lilith hissed.

"I hate this planet. I never should have come. If I'd known Dahl was going to pull out...and about the long days..." Shep said, head drooped. Exhaustion eased the fear out of his voice.

Brick's fists worked at his side, bunching and unbunching. He considered the weight of his rings in the creases of his fingers, his old one-two. Roland hauled Shep up off his knees and began to drag him toward the Raider Headquarters. The prisoner's head snapped up. Terror flooded back into his wide eyes.

"Wait! You said you'd kill me!" he cried to Brick.

Brick shrugged. "I donno. I kinda wanna see the hobbling thing."

"But..but..." Shep's eyes darted over him before settling noticeably on his necklace. Brick reached up and clutched the paws and key, but Shep's gaze wasn't directed there. It was the other necklace he focused on, the one Rocko had strung for him: metal loops, and, in the center, the Hyperion security clip.

Hope lit Shep's face. "Look! He's a traitor, too! That's a Hyperion access key around his neck."

The mention of that key broke something in Brick. His trance, maybe, or his hold on his animal. He lunged forward. Shep flinched back against Roland, but not for long. The furious brute caught him by the collar and dragged him out of Roland's grasp. His animal sprang up; Brick could feel the feverish knot of it in his throat.

It plied him with its ancient promise—release from pain, from culpability, from his own monstrous need—and Brick surrendered to it gratefully.

* * *

"Brick!  _Amigo_ , please-" Wide, witch-fire green eyes, barely glimpsed through his animal's red coils. " _Mi pata de perro!_ "

Something struck him in the back—a hard, painless impact that made Brick whoof and lose his breath—and spanged off his energy shield. He spun around. His animal slid away, back into the curved recesses of his mind. It left Brick exposed.

Roland stood a few yards away, his Patton revolver raised and trembling in his hands. Brick's fingers trembled, too. His thumbs felt slick and strange, and he held up his hands to look at them. His palms were spackled with gore, his thumbs glistened with a milky goop. The sight of them turned his stomach. A memory surfaced: hazy, but tactile. His thumbs pressed into soft, screaming flesh. Into eye sockets.

He whirled back to look at Mordecai, but his eyes were fine. Brick had seen them moments before, screamingly bright and beautiful, and relief surged through his body.

A nearby splash of red caught his attention. It was Shep, sprawled on the ground, clearly dead, mouth gaped open so Brick could see all the way to his back teeth. His eyes were gone, replaced by black pits. A halo of blood encircled his head.

Brick remembered the rest. He had crouched to bash the traitor's head into the ground, over and over and over, until Shep's scalp mashed into the pavement with an unpleasant yielding sensation instead of a satisfying crack, and someone had touched his shoulder, and called his name...trying to holler him home.

"Hey,  _amigo._ You alright?"

"I..." Brick swallowed. He could feel the slickness of the ruined eyeballs under his thumbnails, like the glass he'd promised Shep, and his stomach pitched and rolled.

"Fuck," Roland said. The swear was surprising from his lips. "Ah, shit. Brick, why'd you have to do that?"

Brick turned around, looking over the other Raiders. A crowd of people had gathered at a safe distance around the square, and they flinched away from his gaze. Brick knew how he looked. That monster - that hateful, snarl lipped, sunken eyed gargoyle - sometimes startled him from mirrors.

His eyes settled on Roland. "You shot me," Brick said.

"I had to. You can't murder a man in cold blood, with no trial."

"What're you talkin about? We kill folks all the time!" But Brick knew it was different, this time. Those other people had been armed aggressors, not shackled prisoners, and the Raiders had killed them in self defense.

"This is why I told you to go to the guard tower. I was going to tell you later, give it time to sink in. If you followed my orders..."

Rocko strolled up beside Brick and looked over the corpse. Brick searched the younger man's eyes for the horror he expected, but as hard as he tried, he found nothing besides disinterest and something like amusement.

"Are you listening to me?" Roland asked. His sanctimonious tone made Brick's lip curl.

"Not really. Nothin' we can do about it now," he grunted.

"I can do one thing."

"Yeah? You gonna try to bring him back? I'll kill him again, maybe a little slower this time," Brick snorted.

"I can kick you out," Roland said.

The star of anger that had been born during the conversation with Mordecai (which seemed like hours ago, though it had only been minutes) pulsed and throbbed. His nails bit into his palm. "You exilin' me?"

"No. You can live in Sanctuary, just not as a Raider."

"Oh! Okay! Thanks, Dad. Glad I'm still fit to live with civilized people. You sure you don't wanna just kill me? That's what you tired to do to Frank. Rocko and Bool used to be bandits, you know. Why don't you kill them, too?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Roland said. "Just calm down, and-"

"Fuck this. I'm not gonna live here with your smug ass anymore. I'll go," Brick snarled. He'd never belonged in Sanctuary, anyway. He was a bandit, he and Rocko both.

"Brick." It was Mordecai, standing close, close enough to see Brick shivering. In a lower voice, he added, "Don't do this,  _m_ _i pata de perro_."

The endearment, rarely uttered and now said twice in as many minutes, sent a painful twang all through Brick's body, head to heart to groin, and for a desperate moment he nearly lost his resolve. But he could feel Roland's eyes boring into him, could feel the heat of his scorn.

"No. I gotta go," he said, brushing away Mordecai's fingers when he tried to touch his blood spattered wrist.

"Bastard," Mordecai hissed as he withdrew. "You're a selfish, stubborn bastard, you know that? A goddamned idiot."

Unlike  _baboso,_  which meant the same thing, the 'idiot' that escaped Mordecai's lips had no affection in it. It stung like a hurled stone. He looked back at his friend, eyes wide.

"I'm not going to apologize. You're acting like a dick," Mordecai said.

"You don't need to apologize. I get it."

"Oh, come on. You know I didn't mean-"

But Brick was already walking away, through the loose huddle Raiders and onlookers, looking steadfastly forward. Rocko caught his arm as he passed and followed him toward Scooter's garage.

"Where do you think you're gonna go, huh?" Roland called from behind him. "This is the last free city!"

"This ain't no free city. A bandit lives where he wants."

Those seemed like good parting words, so when Roland's voice called out again, perplexed,  _Bandit?_  Brick ignored him and kept walking.

After they rounded the corner, Rocko sighed. "Good riddance. I thought you'd never want to go, but I couldn't take it anymore."

"Yeah?"

"To be honest, I was going to leave soon, with or without you."

"You sure you wanna stick with me? You saw what I did to that guy."

"Of course. Babe, I used to live in a bandit clan. This kind of thing happened every day. But if it worked the way it did in my clan, and you disobeyed an order from the top, Roland wouldn't stopped with that first bullet. He'd have killed you."

"Huh," Brick mused. "Would you start sleeping with him, then?"

Rocko fell silent, stiffened in the crook of Brick's arm.

"Lighten up. I was jokin," Brick said, flashing a grin.

Rocko returned the grin, but weakly. "Yeah. No, I get it."

They reached the garage, climbed into their truck, and sped out through Sanctuary's gates with no explanation to Bool. They rode in the same Bandit Technical they'd driven in two weeks earlier, before everything had fallen apart. But that wasn't right. Things had begun to fall apart the moment Kindle slipped off that railing. It had just taken Brick awhile to realize it.


	16. Rock

Brick turned the gun over in his hands. The SMG's opalescent shell shone in the faint moonlight that reached them in the armory, and an elemental tech cartridge clipped to the barrel glowed with ghostly green light.

Brick whistled appreciatively. "The Baby Maker."

"What did you call me?" Rocko asked.

"Not you," Brick said with a rumbling chuckle. "The gun. It's a rare Tediore prototype. They shelved it 'cos the construct cost was too high for most folks. But for you an me, well...'s long as we're robbing these assholes, anyway..."

"The Baby Maker," Rocko repeated. "What a ridiculous name."

"You ever notice how when you make a joke, you think it's funny, but other people's stuff 's all ridiculous?"

Rocko shot him a withering look. Brick grinned, tossing the lightweight sub-machine gun from hand to hand. "Just sayin'. Oh, shit-" Brick said. The gun slipped through his fingers and clattered to the floor.

The both held their breath. For a moment, nothing happened, and Brick exhaled; but then the gun exploded into a spray of shrapnel and green goop. Rocko clambered up a row of lockers, out of reach of the corrosive splatter.

The burst husk of the gun digistructed a second projectile- a perfect copy of the first. When the matrix stabilized, it bounced once and exploded, too, prompting Brick to duck behind an overturned table. His shield beeped, reduced to half charge.

"They'll have heard that," Rocko said.

As if in answer, the voices of bandits came from outside, too far for Brick to make out the words, but drawing closer. They'd find them soon. Although the stash's entrance was equipped with an electrical field, Rocko had shot out of the fuse box to get inside.

"At least I got a new gun," Brick said. The digivice module on his wrist was already spinning a phantom web in the air, a grid to reconstruct the Baby Maker. Now that the serial key was in his database, Tediore would, for a price, flash him a new copy whenever he requested one.

"Time to field test," Rocko said, peering around the corner. "Get my back. I'll lead you to the bridge."

Brick followed him out onto the landing. He had a moment to take in his surroundings—the bandit shantytown clinging to the sheer cliffs, a jagged skyline silhouetted by the moon—before a skinny, feral looking bandit leaped out of the darkness.

It screamed something like 'blood sausages!' as it lunged, and Brick slammed a fist into its jaw, sent it plummeting over the platform where they stood. He heard it babble as it fell, down and down, until it was out of earshot; 'It's time for three, four pounds of flesh! Blood sausages for everyone! Equal blood for equal work...'

Brick chuckled.

"Pleased with yourself?" Rocko tsked, tilting his head to urge Brick to follow.

"Come on, that was awesome. You gotta gimme that," Brick said, tailing Rocko, hugging the shadows. The younger man navigated the steep, uneven terrain with the ease of a man familiar with his surroundings. He led Brick to a makeshift bridge—just a few steel pylons with sheet metal laid overtop—and crossed with a dancer's grace.

The whole rig rattled as Brick followed him across. He tried not to look into the abyss below. "This place is nuts."

"You'll get used to it." Rocko said. A coy grin crept across his face, and gave Brick the most spine tingling look from under his dark eyelashes. He risked a moment to wrap his arms around the larger man's waist. "You'll have plenty of time to learn, when you're king."

"Don't count your chickens," Brick said. He spotted a marauder sidling toward them, hidden in the shadows of a ridge, and hurled his submachine gun. It cracked against the stone and illuminated the bandit's wide eyes by a net of glowing, caustic goop. The first explosion wiped out the marauder's shield, and the second smeared him into the ground.

A different bandit crept up from behind and shot Brick in the back, point blank. His energy shield depleted with pop.

He swung around and knocked the gun out of the raider's hand- One- and slammed his other fist into his head- Two- and brought the first fist back around, knocking the raider into Rocko- One- and watched his partner jam a knee hard into his groin. The raider collapsed to his knees.

Rocko grabbed the bandit's mask and ripped it off, revealing the red faced, gasping man underneath. He studied him for a long moment.

"I remember you," he said, after awhile. "You remember me? Bet you wish you hadn't done it, now. Bet you wish you hadn't fucked with me," he mused. The raider wheezed, and Rocko stared down at him with a disinterested, dreamy smile, then raised the muzzle of his revolver to the bandit's head. He squeezed the trigger.

The executed bandit slumped forward. Rocko dug a boot under his chest and flipped him over the edge of the plateau, then stood at the precipice to watch the body tumble into the ravine. Under his breath, so Brick barely heard, he murmured; "Shouldn't have done it..."

Brick shuddered and looked away.

In the distance, searchlights swept the sky in a slow arc. Rocko left the ledge to come up beside Brick. "That's the buzzard factory. The new king will be there."

"How do you know?"

"That's how it works. It's like...the castle."

Brick looked at Rocko, searching his expression. The beams of light reflected in his dark, solemn eyes, and Brick leaned in to surprise him with a peck on the cheek.

"When we own this joint, we don't hafta live there. If it's too hard."

Rocko grinned and pulled him down into a full, titillating kiss on the mouth, one which he broke from too soon.

"Let's go, before more of them spot us," Rocko said, half dragging Brick up the hill. They paused under a platform. Moonlight laid the shadow of a grate across Rocko's face.  _Shh,_  he signed with his finger pressed to his lips, and slipped away again, climbing up a pile of discarded parts. Brick barely managed to keep up.

At the top of the platform, he found himself standing at the edge of an expanse of paved concrete, studded by shipping containers and the rusted shells of fuel tanks. A dilapidated warehouse loomed over them. Guards stood around the perimeter of the factory. They looked alert, their guns drawn.

"I don't know if we can slip by," Rocko said.

Brick cracked his knuckles. "Guess we're done sneakin."

"I guess," Rocko said. He sounded unsure, but Brick had already plowed into the open. If Mordecai were here, he would have hollered for Brick to get his fat head out of the way, to stop blocking his shots. But Rocko only followed him onto the field, ducking behind debris to pick his shots from cover.

Brick dispatched guards left and right, swinging his fists (his own left and right) like twin wrecking balls. When he was overwhelmed and his shield began to run out, he tossed off a few loaded Baby Makers. Pillars of nasty smelling green smoke bloomed on the concrete: corrosive clouds that scalded any bandit foolish enough to cross them.

While Brick snapped the neck of a marauder, he sensed someone coming up from behind. He spun around just as he heard the whipcrack of a revolver shot. A hulking bandit collapsed, a hole opened in the back of its head. Rocko stood a few feet away, pistol still raised and smoking.

"Another one bites the dust," Rocko sniffed. "This is fun."

"Right?" Brick grinned.

They made their way to the door, intermittently diving for cover to let their shields recharge and barreling out to slaughter bandits. Rocko started singing. When Brick caught onto the simple, repetitive lyrics, he sung along.

By the time they reached the entrance of the buzzard factory, they were both belting out the words over the static rattle of gunfire.

"Are you happy? Are you satisfied? How long can you stand the heat? Out of the doorway, bullets rip! To the sound out the beat!" Rocko cried.

"Another one bites the dust! An' another one down, another one down, another one bites the dust," Brick bellowed. He grappled with a brute who tried to stop them at the door, punching in time with the tune, then laid him out with a uppercut. "Another one bites the dust!"

They burst through the door. Most of the guards had already left the warehouse to face Brick and Rocko in the shipping yard, but a few remained. The duo dispatched them quickly. Rocko looked to the upper floor, to the throne room, but the current king was nowhere in sight.

"What now?" Brick asked.

"These idiots won't give up until we find the king. We gotta either kill him, or get permission to stay here."

"How's anyone do that?"

Rocko shrugged. "Most don't. Let's check the roof. Maybe he's trying to escape by buzzard."

"Buzzard?" Brick asked as they crossed the cracked concrete to a doorway. Through there, they mounted a stairwell.

"Something Dahl was working on. I was part of the team. They're, uh...You'll see."

Brick grunted. The metal scaffolding clanked under his boots as Rocko led him to across the upper story to another staircase, which they stamped up unhesitatingly. No other bandits accosted them. The palace guard had been exhausted. Still, Rocko whistled their battle anthem as they emerged onto the roof.

At this altitude, they had a panoramic view of Thousand Cuts- the clan's shantytown and the Hyperion Base only a few clicks away, protected from the bandits by a blasted battleground and an electrified fence. Brick and Rocko stood on a tarmac, tarry black asphalt striped by reflective tape that had worn away in places. Brick saw the buzzards at once, a small fleet of some kind of bare-bones, patchy looking aircrafts. They didn't seem very impressive.

"Hey! Get back here, you piece of shit!" Rocko yelled, tearing off across the roof after a gangling youth with tattered jeans and gauges. The punk's floppy mohawk bounced as he sprinted away, kicking up asphalt under his high tops. The back of the kid's leather jacket sported an illustration of a bulldog with pigtails.

"No way, man! Low blow, sneaking in here. What happened to honor among thieves?" The punk was running hard for the buzzards. He reached the nearest one and dove into the seat. After a moment of working the controls, the dual engines roared to life.

But Rocko was close, and closing in fast. He raised his revolver and put two rounds into the cockpit, a square shot, and the kid's shield discharged with a crackle.

"No fair!" the bandit shrilled, slamming on the buzzard's controls. "Gimme a chance-"

He was cut short as Rocko's next bullet found its mark, plunging straight into his eye. He collapsed against the throttle. The buzzard rocked forward, nearly upturning over its nose, and scraped a few feet across the ground.

Rocko caught up and yanked the dead bandit out of the cockpit. He did something with the controls, and the buzzard's engines whined to a stop just as Brick reached them.

"Issat him? The king?" Brick asked, frowning down at the punk.

"Um...I guess so," Rocko said, scanning the blacktop around them. The white landing strips caught the searchlight's glow, stark against the deepening darkness. To Brick, they looked runes for some satanic ritual. He shuddered. His arms had broken into a rash of goosebumps, and he hugged himself.

"Kind of a wimpy little bastard."

"I noticed," Rocko said, prodding the body with his toe. "I don't understand. How did a prick like this keep his position, even if he did manage to kill the last king?"

"Brick? You there?" said a voice over Brick's ECHO.

He almost didn't answer, but he'd left the unit on speaker, and Rocko was looking at him expectantly. "Lil? Whatchu want?"

"Hey. So...I don't like how we left things."

"I liked it fine."

"Please, Brick, don't be this way. I just-"

 _Whoom-_  a tremendous explosion drowned out the rest. The buzzard was blown into the air on a pillar of flame, spraying shards of metal and oily blue smoke. The wall of heat knocked Brick back. He spun around, caught Rocko with one meaty arm, and hugged him protectively. He hit the ground on top of the smaller man, shielding him with his body. Heat singed his shirt and blistered his back.

Faintly, over the ringing in his ears, he heard Lilith's voice. "Brick? Are you okay? What was that?"

"I donno..." he grunted, struggling into a sitting position.

An enormous, shadowy figure streaked toward them, a rocket launcher propped on one shoulder. It moved fast, twisting at the narrow hips, almost gliding through the heat haze. It wasn't until the person had nearly reached Brick that he saw the pigtails, and the lipstick smeared around her howling mouth.

"You murdered my Omar! I'll fucking kill you!"

 _Behind every good king..._ Brick thought, madly, as the bandit queen closed in on them.


	17. Rule

The queen reached them and swung the rocket launcher down before Brick could react. It slammed into his jaw, knocked him flat. Stars burst behind his eyes. All thoughts flew from his mind.

They resettled, one by one, like birds back to a wire.

_Get up._

He did, scrambling away from the enraged queen, and dragged himself up against the rusted hull of a shipping crate. He was cornered, but on his feet.

The bandit queen loomed over him, an inverted pyramid of muscle and barely concealed cleavage, her short skirt and low cut top more appropriate for clubbing on the dance floor than clubbing with the butt of a rocket launcher, but that didn't stop her from raising the weapon again.

He lurched aside, avoiding the blunt steel by inches.

"What's going on?" Lilith asked over the ECHO.

"I gotta go. I'll call you back," he said, and ducked another swing.

He wondered where Rocko was, but then he saw him, fleeing across the tarmac. Brick's stomach knotted, but he had no time to wonder about why Rocko would abandon him. _Shoot her. Do something._ He twitched his wrist to summon a new Baby Maker. It spun into existence with a soft shirring sound, but before it was fully formed, the queen struck again.

The launcher caught on Brick's half constructed SMG and smacked it out of his hand. It skittered across the asphalt, leaving small pools of acid in its wake, then self destructed. The queen looked over at the explosion with wide, piggy eyes.

While she was distracted, Brick struck with an uppercut. She stumbled back, giving him just enough space to squeeze by. He sprinted across the tarmac and flashed a request for another Baby Maker.

The queen recovered quickly. He could hear her coming after him, not with the thunder of footfalls, but with a strange, hissing clatter.  _Roller blades_ , Brick finally realized, and barked a convulsive laugh.

He tripped on something in the dark and lurched forward. The gun jumped out of his grip, and he didn't get his elbows out in front in time. His face smacked on the ground. His nose folded sideways with a crack.

The queen plowed into him, fast, and was sent flying over his prone body.

Brick groaned and pushed himself to his knees. His nose was broken. His head throbbed, his whole face had been scraped raw. The queen lay on the asphalt a few feet away, face down, limbs splayed. Brick realized, with an absurd cringe of embarrassment, that he could see up her skirt. He caught a glimpse of her pink panties with almost hallucinatory clarity. He looked away, but saw her stir out of the corner of his eye.

Noise like a swarm of bees thrummed through his head. He clutched his temples, eyes screwed shut.

"Brick!" someone yelled over the cacophony.

Brick squinted up. A buzzard hovered almost directly over top of him, silhouetted against the searchlights, landing gears like the talons of a predatory bird. Brick gaped.

"Come on!" Rocko said, leaning half out of the cockpit, hand outstretched.

Brick grabbed him with one hand and the landing gear with the other, and hauled himself up. Rocko grunted with the effort. "Fuck, babe," he wheezed as Brick squeezed into the seat beside him. "You scared me. I thought you spaced out again."

 _Gone, slipped across the curve,_  Brick thought. A nonsense phrase, something rattled loose in his knocked skull.

Rocko worked the buzzard's controls while Brick continued to reel, clutching the seat, eyes closed tight, as the buzzard climbed. They crossed the beam of a searchlight, briefly turning the backs of his eyelids red.

"Thanks," he muttered.

The responding voice was not Rocko's, but Lilith's. "I know you said you have to go, but I really need to talk to you."

"Fine. What is it?" Something spanged off the underbelly of the buzzard, loud enough to hear over the engine. Gunshots. Brick peered out of the cockpit to see the queen firing on them with a revolver. He ducked back in just as a bullet whizzed past. "Persistent bitch."

"Excuse me?" Lilith gasped.

"Not you."

"Uh-huh. I just wanted to...forget it." The connection crackled out.

Rocko turned a hard right, nearly pitching the craft over in a roll, and Brick grabbed the seat to keep from sliding out.

"Whaddaya doing? She's got a little peashooter down there. She can't-" Brick said, but before he could finish the thought, there came a loud grinding. Metal tearing, followed by a belch of smoke. The buzzard jerked.

"Damn," Rocko sighed.

Brick swallowed. "What was that?"

"She shot out one of the engines."

"With a handgun? What kinda thing is this, if you can take it out with one good shot? I thought you helped build these."

"They weren't finished!" Rocko huffed, struggling with the controls. The throttle juddered in his grip.

The buzzard tipped past the point of equilibrium, rolled, and plummeted out of the sky. Brick cast a quick glance to his shield. Full power. He hoped it would be enough. All he could do was grab Rocko, fold him in the protective crook of his arm, and spring clear of the craft.

They hit the ground and rolled a few feet. The buzzard smashed into the ground nearby, obliterating the remainder of their shields with a shuddery wave of heat and shrapnel. Brick looked down at the other man. His black eyes were wide, reflecting the dancing flames.

"You okay?" Brick asked.

"I warned you," Rocko said.

"Huh?"

"I told you, I'm  _not_  a good engineer."

Brick kissed him, laughing. They didn't stay like that for long. The queen was still out there. The pair struggled up, arms locked and braced against each other, grinning and patting debris off their clothes. Rocko spotted the queen first and pointed.

"Ding-dong, the witch is dead," he said.

She'd been crushed by the buzzard. Only her calves and roller blades poked out from under the flaming wreck, one wheel still spinning lazily.

"So..." Brick said, wrapping an arm around the younger man's middle. "What's your first decree as Queen?"

Rocko folded against him, practically purring with satisfaction. His fingers fluttered up to Brick's chest. "That's really up to you. You're the  _king_." The word rolled off his tongue lovingly, and Brick kissed it from his lips. His hand came up to fold around Rocko's, and he paused. Something was wrong.

"What?" Rocko asked, feeling Brick stiffen. "What's the matter?"

"My necklace," Brick said. Not the one with the paws and key. That was there, but the one with the security chip was gone.

"Did you leave it in Sanctuary?" Rocko asked.

That had been two days ago. Brick touched the damn things a hundred times a day, restlessly probing those old wounds, and he would have noticed by now.

He remembered a snag when he'd leaped out of the buzzard, a quick tug around his neck. Had that been his necklace catching on something? Brick looked at the flaming wreckage of the buzzard. Rocko followed his gaze.

"No, no. Don't even think about it," he said, but Brick wasn't listening. He checked his shield readout again. It was back to full. If he could duck in quickly, find the chain, and get out... "Brick!" Rocko grabbed his arm.

Brick shrugged him off and plunged into the fire. Flames snapped over his shield, casting him in orange and electric white light. The buzzard's cockpit gaped open, sagging where the metal melted, and Brick's eyes darted over its frame, searching.

The keen of tortured, twisting metal rose over the roar of flames. A beam snapped—the neck of a crane—and crashed down behind Brick, cutting off his route back to Rocko. The flames reared up around the impact.

Brick could no longer see through the wall of heat. Smoke prodded its prickly fingers into his lungs, making him cough.

"Okay, I'll just say it. I'm sorry!" Lilith said, her voice bursting from the ECHO unit, clear and unexpected.

"I..." Brick started, but his lungs hitched and burned, and he hacked uncontrollably.

"I shouldn't have let you go like that. Roland is sorry too, he's just to stubborn to say." While Lilith was talking, Brick caught the glimmer of silver through the smoke. It was his necklace, dangling from the buzzard's shredded hull. He snatched it free. The hot metal burned his palm, but he closed his fist around it anyway, grimacing as it seared his flesh.

"Brick?"

"Lil," he wheezed. He stumbled blindly through the fire. Darkness closed around him.

"Are you in trouble?"

Brick answered with another coughing fit and fell to his knees. The flames blistered his skin. He couldn't think, couldn't move. His animal felt distant, at the bottom of some ocean. Brick was alone.

Then, suddenly, he wasn't. A figure stood over him: a gaunt, black form, silhouetted against a world of fire.

 _Mordy._ The figure grabbed his hand, and he discovered that it wasn't Mordecai, after all. These fingers the short, slender fingers of a woman.

The world of fire vanished. Brick plunged into a void— _across the curve_ _—_ as empty and icy as space, but only for a moment. He burst back into existence, gasping. That first suck of fresh air was ragged, painful, but such a relief that it pushed tears to his eyes.

Now he stood on the open tarmac, looking at the fire which had just a moment ago engulfed him. Lilith was the one who'd saved him. Her eyes were sunken, and she looked weary, but she flashed him a grin. "Pretty good, huh?"

"Yeah," he agreed. Rocko had been pacing around the wreck, calling for Brick, but when Lilith spoke, he whirled around. Relief smoothed his pinched brow. He launched himself at Brick and flung his arms around him.

"I told you not to go," he scolded.

"I had to," Brick said. He opened his clenched hand and grimaced as seared flesh peeled away, stuck to the totem. It had been deformed slightly by his grip, lined by the creases in his palm, but it had survived. So had he. It didn't escape his notice that if Lilith hadn't rescued him, two people would have died with that same chip clutched in their fist.

"It's not worth dying over," Rocko said, as if reading Brick's mind.

"How could you say that? You knew her!"

"You think she would've wanted you to die for some stupid chip that didn't even mean anything to her?"

Brick growled. "She died for this stupid thing. You should have more respect, since we as good as killed her."

" _Hyperion_  killed her. They knew what they were doing when they threw a couple of innocent kids in prison, but if you don't understand that-"

"Don't talk to me like I'm an idiot. Kindle wouldn't have been out of the block if we hadn't been fightin."

"And she wouldn't have been in jail at all if it weren't for Hyperion," Rocko said. While Brick's voice had been rising, threatening to become a shout, Rocko's remained calm. He spoke patiently, like an adult trying to explain something to a slow child. Lilith shuffled awkwardly and glanced away.

"Fuck you," Brick said. "Of course you wanna think it wasn't our fault. If you hadn't..." He trailed off.

"Just say it. I know what you think. I can see it every time you look at me," Rocko said.

Brick stared down at his feet mutely.

"If I hadn't done the thing with Cash," Rocko finished Brick's earlier sentence. "That's what you mean, right? You think that if I hadn't been such an appalling slut, Kindle would be alive. You're right." Rocko's voice was still low, but full of cracks.

Brick didn't reply. Tears blurred his vision and he worked the trinket over in his hand, twisting and gripping, pressing the edges into his injured palm. Lilith put a hand on his shoulder.

"Brick," she said.

When he looked up, only Lilith remained on the roof. Rocko had gone.


	18. Judge or King

Brick paced back and forth across the tarmac, backlit by the glow of the flaming buzzards. Lilith listened while he talked.

"He's always like that," Brick said. "He never gets  _mad._  Just acts like a stuck-up little queen. And you know what really pisses me off?"

"What?" Lilith asked.

"He was right. I was bein a idiot. It ain't his fault about Kindle, it's  _mine._  That's why I had to get the stupid necklace. I gotta..." Brick didn't know what he meant to say. Torture himself? "Remember," he finished.

"Brick," Lilith said, catching him with one pale hand as he paced by. She turned him around to face her and looked solemnly into his eyes. "It wasn't your fault."

"You sound like Rocko."

"Good. I agree with him. You're a good person, Brick. That's what I was trying to tell you over the ECHO. I shouldn't have let you go without saying something. Roland is such an asshole sometimes, and I just let him yell at you, so I guess I'm an asshole too. Shep had it coming. What you did to him, that doesn't make you a bandit. It makes you human."

"Hate to break it to ya, Lil, but I am a bandit. I'm a bandit  _king_."

"Oh. Well..." Lilith said. She hugged him unexpectedly, tilting her head back to place a tiny peck of a kiss against the underside of his chin. "I miss the shit out of you. Roland, too, although he'll never admit it. But I understand if you wanna stay here. Don't tell anyone, but sometimes...sometimes, I want to leave, too.  _You_  can hit hyperion where it hurts. You dont have follow any rules. And now you've got a big, expendable army, not to mention, an extremely cute boyfriend.

Brick had been grinning, but now his smile faltered. "Donno if I got a boyfriend anymore. I really fucked up."

"He'll cool off. I think he loves you."

"Nah," Brick said, shaking his head. "He's not like that."

Lilith shrugged. "Everybody falls in love."

Brick thought, unexpectedly, of Mordecai, and a pain tugged at his chest- a deep ache, like a dying tooth.

"Did I mess up, comin out here? Should I go back?" he asked.

"I can't tell you that. All I can say is, you're always welcome in Sanctuary."

"But not in the Raiders," Brick said. It wasn't a question. Lilith hesitated, then nodded.

Brick grunted. "Doesn't matter. I gotta stay. I'm the king.

"I figured. And, listen...it won't be so bad. Make up with your boyfriend, murder some Hyperion bastards, and you'll feel better."

"Yeah. Thanks, by the way. For saving my ass. You phased here?"

"Yep. I've never been here before, so I just thought about you. I thought, I have to be with Brick, right next to him. But even with a shit ton of eridium, I thought I wasn't going to make it."

"Eridium? What're you doin with that stuff?"

"It boosts the siren abilities. Makes my powers about a hundred times more awesome, but it can't do everything. I'm just glad it worked."

"Me too," Brick said, and forced a smile. He didn't like that Lilith was using eridium, didn't trust the stuff, but he wasn't about to poke his nose in her business.

"I should go," Lilith said. "Do you need a kit for your nose?"

"I'll just digistruct one," he said.

"I'll visit when I can." They hugged again, Brick wincing where she touched his blistered skin. Now that the heat of battle had cooled and adrenaline drained away, he hurt like hell. His nose, cheeks, forehead, back and legs...it would have been easier to say what didn't hurt.

She stepped back. "Okay. Here I go," she said.

She shimmered like a heat mirage, just for an instant, and then was gone. It was the same way she entered phasewalk. She might have been there still, just on a different plane of existence—on the curve, Brick thought again, not sure where he'd gleaned the term—but he knew she wasn't. She'd jumped much further, all the way back to Sanctuary.

On his way downstairs, Brick ran into a bandit. He put him in a headlock and told him that Omar was dead, and that he was the new king, Brick. Brick and Rocko. Spread the word. He released the bandit—his subject—and nodded him off, watching him scamper away with a pleased chuckle.

"Rocko! Where'd you go?" Brick grumbled. He cupped his hands around his mouth. "ROCKO!"

"I'm here," Rocko's voice came from nearby, in the stairwell between the first and second floors. Brick followed it to the source, but Rocko wasn't there.

"Where?"

"Come down," he said. Brick stomped downstairs, but still didn't see him. "Under the stairs," Rocko added.

Brick edged beside the stairs, a tight squeeze, and slipped underneath. He found the doorway immediately. The corroded metal door sat ajar on it's hinges, spilling light into the dim space. Brick opened the door enough to sidle into the room.

It was a small chamber with a low ceiling, so he had to duck. Rocko lay curled up on a mattress which was pushed against the wall, much larger than the cot he'd been sleeping on in Sanctuary. A tangle of blankets and pillows had been kicked to the end of the bed. Orange crates were heaped against another well, stacked with a clutter of books and DVDs, and a small television sat on another, turned off.

"It's exactly the same," Rocko said. "I don't think they ever found this place."

"I don't think the big one could'a fit," Brick said, grinning. Rocko didn't laugh. Tentatively, Brick crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, perched behind Rocko's back. He laid a hand on his shoulder. "Sorry about before."

Rocko responded with a haughty little sniff. Brick frowned, but the shoulder under his hand hitched, and Brick realized it hadn't been a haughty sniff at all. Rocko was crying. He'd never seen him cry before, not even after Kindle died.

"Are you okay?" he asked. Rocko nodded. "You sure?"

Rocko paused, then shook his head. Brick shifted to lie down beside the younger man and pulled him into his arms. "It's not your fault. I shouldn't have said nothin like that. I'm sorry."

Rocko turned over to face Brick and sighed against his chest. "Don't have to humble yourself to me. I ain't your judge or your king," he mumbled, quoting the song he'd started months ago, when he'd forced his way into Brick's cell.  _I ain't no porcupine..._

And, for a blue-eyed miracle, Brick remembered the next line. "Baby, you know you ain't no queen amoeba."

Rocko did laugh, then, hooting against Brick's chest until tears of laughter replaced the others. It took awhile for him to catch his breath. "That's...that's not right. It's...Oh, hell. What are you doing to me?"

"I was tryin to make you feel better," Brick grunted. His face, already warmed by the scratches and the ache of his broken nose, flushed hotly. "Geez. I know I ain't a genius, you don't hafta rub it in."

"No," Rocko admitted. "You're not a genius, but you are a king. My king."

Brick cupped his chin and pulled him close, and pressed their lips together in a chaste kiss.

"It's not your fault, either," Rocko said, his tone suddenly serious. "About Kindle. I said it before, but you didn't believe it. You have to believe it."

Brick didn't, not from him or from Lilith, but he didn't care to argue, either. Instead, he caught Rocko's mouth in another kiss, this one deeper, a sensuous petting of tongues, but had to pull away before long. He gasped for air, unable to breathe through his mangled nose. He touched it, felt how it was still wonked to one side, and winced.

"How do you even kiss me like this?" he asked as he tapped a command into his digistruct module. "I look like hell."

"You look hot. Rugged sexy."

Brick snorted, sending a lightning strike of pain through his nose. It loosed a fresh glut of blood that dripped down his chin and onto the mattress. "Shid," he grunted, "Sowwy."

"Bound to happen anyway. I think you have to reset it."

Brick shuddered. He unclipped the latch on the digistructed med kit, fished out the medicated wipes, ripped open one of the paper packets, and wiped it across his face. His cheeks tingled as new skin filled in the scrapes. "Do id fow me?" he asked, softening the consonants that threatened to send that electric agony though his nose again.

"You want me to set it?"

Brick nodded.

Rocko frowned and leaned in to inspect the mangled nose. "Okay. But you'll owe me."

Brick grunted in agreement. They sat up, facing each other on the mattress, legs sloppily intertwined. Rocko put one hand on the larger man's shoulder and raised the other one to his face, where, flinching as though it was his nose rather than Brick's, clamped thumb and forefinger around either side of the bridge. Brick failed to suppress a groan.

"Sorry!"

"Jud do id," Brick ordered, eyes squeezed shut. Rocko sucked in a hard breath and jerked his nose straight with a firm tug. Brick barked and fell back, automatically pulling away from the source of the pain. His palm came down on something under the blankets and snapped it with an audible crack.

Blood poured freely from his nose, soaking his shirt. Rocko fumbled though the med kit and found a swatch of medicated gauze, which he taped under his nostrils. "How's it feel?" he asked.

Brick grunted. "Fine."

" _Now_  you look like a dork. Hey, what was that? You fell on something."

"Oh," Brick said, and shifted to retrieve the object from under the blankets.

It was a framed photograph of two people: A muscular man, and a little girl who who looked about eight years old. Both were sienna skinned with bluish black hair, the girl's long and braided, the man's short and hooked around under his nose in a bushy mustache. They were grinning and had their arms wrapped around each other.

Rocko's dark eyes turned even darker when they glimpsed the photo. He took it from Brick and held it in his lap, gaze fixed on the smiling duo.

"Is that Stone?" Brick asked.

"Yeah."

"Who's the girl?"

"Ruby. His daughter."

"Daughter...! You never said-"

"She's dead," Rocko said.

"Oh."

Rocko didn't offer any further explanation, but set the cracked frame and the photo aside, tucked it into one of the crates. He laid back down on the bed and pulled one of the blankets up to his chin. Brick snuggled up beside him, laying one arm over his waist. Although their bodies pressed together, Rocko seemed a million miles away. Brick hugged him close.

"I love you," he blurted out.

"You don't have to-" Rocko started to protest, but Brick covered his mouth briefly.

"Just say it. Don't be an ass."

Rocko sniffed. "I love you, too."

"Cool," Brick said, one hand snaking up to brush a lock of hair from Rocko's forehead. He pressed a kiss to the cool skin beneath.

Rocko hummed something like a lullaby. His muscles relaxed in Brick's arms, became slack. His tune faltered. Soon the humming stopped and his breathing became deep and regular. Brick left the single lamp lit. King or not, he was reluctant to sleep in a strange place, surrounded by bandits, and even less inclined in the darkness.

He closed his eyes. When he began to pray, Rocko jolted, squirmed, and mumbled a few of the familiar lines along with.  _Amen_ , they murmured, and Rocko slipped immediately into a sleep that Brick envied. His own rest was disturbed, punctuated by vivid dreams about the Garden, and of the patient, hungry moon.


	19. Slabs

A dog howled in the distance. Another joined it, then another, and more, until the world was full of their mournful song. The sound made Brick's neck and arms prickle.

He remembered going to sleep in Thousand Cuts, but now he was somewhere else. Somewhere cool and clean, standing in grass that came up to his knees and rolled out as far as he could see, mounded in gently sloping hills, receding into a purple skyline. The chorus of dogs peaked and petered out, until all that remained were isolated yelps.

Brick was dreaming, but it was no ordinary dream. That moon, the hunting moon, hung low and pale in the sky.

A short distance away, the grass rustled. A pale, wedge shaped head poked over the stalks, its broad muzzle split into a grin.

"Pris..?" Brick said. He stumbled forward, picking up speed, until he was tearing across the field toward his dog. He knew he was dreaming, but he couldn't help himself. It was too vivid. Priscilla was there,  _right there,_  where he could tousle her down and pull her ears...

He stopped before he reached her. She hadn't moved, not an inch, not when he called her name and not when he sprinted across the field. Now that Brick was close enough to see her eyes, and saw that something was wrong with them. They weren't pale blue, like they had been— _when she was alive_ , he reminded himself—but had become empty, glassy orbs. Moon-eyes.

All around, the grass shivered and parted, split by the hunched backs and domed heads of other dogs. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, all shapes and sizes. They all watched at Brick with empty eyes. He took a step backward.

The moon had driven the dogs mad. They had howled to it and it infected them, somehow, taking away their dogness, turning them into soulless meat.

As though it could hear what Brick was thinking, the moon turned toward him. It cast an unfeeling eye over his mind and rumbled with laughter when it found what it was looking for.

 _FASS_.

The dogs leaped toward Brick. They streamed after him with uncanny grace and coordination, and he whirled around, stumbling, feet snagging in the grass, tearing it out by the roots. He could feel the dogs behind him, their hot breath at his back.

The ground before him shattered, ripped apart as something pushed through. It swelled into a tall, lumpy blockade, and Brick clambered up, desperate to escape the snapping jaws.

He went on for awhile before he recognized what he was climbing through. They were bodies. Not human, but alien: the guardians that had tried to stop Brick and his friends from opening the vault. As their corpses roiled upward, he gripped their glossy shells and planted his feet against throbbing, vascular spiderwebs, past bulging black orbs and spindly, knobby legs. Some were still twitching.

The dogs fell away, their howls dwindling. At last, Brick reached the top. He looked around.

More spires had thrust from the earth—Coral and cobalt, smooth and veiny—and Brick suddenly recognized them. They were the alien structures that dotted the Garden, the landscape which now curved out and away under his gaze. Squinting, he could make out figures far below, frolicking through fields and lakes with naked abandon.

Brick breathed deeply. Up here, the air was sweet, the sky ripe with stars, crowded together so thick that there was nearly more starlight than void.

"You changed your mind. You stayed in the Kingdom of Man," a voice said. The moon's voice. It didn't speak aloud, but echoed in Brick's head like his own thoughts.

"Yeah," he said. His head throbbed with a sick, feverish heat.

"Why?"

"The girls don't need me anymore. I...I fucked up."

Something was happening below, some commotion, and he watched the scene unfold. The naked figures had ceased their languorous hedonism. Now they tore across the fields, screaming with distant, tinny voices, and it took Brick a moment to see why. It was the dogs. They ran after the figures, pounced, dragged them down and ripped them apart.

Brick swallowed and looked away, up at the stars and moon.

 _Nothing at all to be done about that,_  he thought. He didn't speak the words aloud, but the moon heard him anyway. Of course it did. This was all Brick's mind, turned inside out.

"YOU CAN BRING HER BACK," the moon said, its voice changed. It had been low, intimate, but now it boomed. It filled Brick's head with pain.

He closed his eyes and saw Kindle's eyes—twin suns—emblazoned on the back of his lids, just like shape of the Hyperion chip was now burned into his hand. He would have given anything, even his own worthless life, to relight those suns, but it was impossible. A soul couldn't be hollered home.  _Shouldn't be._

A shadow fell over the moon. It waned, becoming a silver crescent.

I SEE.

"I want to go home," Brick said. He felt suddenly very young, very weak. The people below continued to scream, but the sound grew fainter as the dogs picked them off. Brick reached up to grab the key on his necklace, but he reached with the wrong hand- the burned one. He'd forgotten to treat it.

The pain shocked him, and he jolted...

* * *

...awake.

Brick dropped the necklace and sat up. He was twisted in the sheets, clammy and shaking, pulse yammering, but already the dream began to slip through the cracks of his mind.

His hand didn't hurt as much as it had in his dream, but ached enough to send him fumbling for the open bottle of nanite infused antiseptic. He found it under the blankets—where Rocko had been, though he'd slipped out sometime while Brick slept—and slathered a generous fistful into his palm.

He lay back on the mattress, holding up his hand. Sweat pricked his brow as he watched the red, puckered flesh smooth over, stretching taut over the muscle. It itched deep into the meat of his palm. Brick tried to remember the old superstition his daddy had told him, the one about itchy palms. That he'd be coming into money soon?

When the crawly sensation stopped, Brick inspected the new, pink skin. A few patches had been seared smooth, so the creases stuttered, leaving hollow places across his life and love lines—a creaseless crater where Mordecai had once planted a kiss.

The room smelled stale, like dust and mold, and Brick wanted to get out of there. But first, he retrieved the photograph of Stone and his daughter from where Rocko had stashed it. He studied their faces, trying to remember the girl's name. It was the name of some gemstone- Opal, or something like that. No, Brick thought. It was Ruby. Rocko hadn't told him about her. Because it was too hard to talk about? Or for the same reason Brick didn't talk often about Amanda or his dogs...because he felt responsible?

He tucked the frame back into the crate and climbed to his feet. He clipped his energy shield on his belt and holstered his Masher revolver—now the only gun he didn't simply digistruct—before crossing to the door.

He exited the cramped room, swallowing a deep, grateful breath, inhaling the strangely comforting smell of rubber and oily tang of metal.

"Rocko, babe?" he called, the syllables swollen by a yawn. He gave his belly a lazy scratch as he ambled into the main chamber. "You here?"

"I'm outside," Rocko called back.

Brick exited into the open shipping yard. Stark sunlight greeted him, and he squinted against its glare, waiting for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he was greeted by Rocko waving him over. The man slouched against a corrugated metal crate in the shade, his hair still sleep mussed and falling into his eyes. Bandits stood or perched around in a loose semicircle, and they parted to let Brick through. A few saluted. One gave a sloppy sort of bow.

Brick chuckled, shaking his head. "At ease, boys."

Rocko hummed a sleepy acknowledgment to Brick when he reached him, first pushing his hair out of the younger man's face and then kissing him. Brick heard a bandit scoff and his hand dropped to the revolver on his hip. The bandit took the hint, falling silent.

"Whaddya doin out here?" he asked Rocko.

"Just finding out about the Hyperion occupation," he said, tucking himself neatly against Brick's side.

"Yeah? And?"

"Don't know yet. I was about to ask. Hey, you. What's your name?" Rocko said, looking to the nearest bandit.

"Me?" the raider asked. When Rocko nodded, he said, "Bone. M'name's Bone. And Hyperion...they, uh...I donno. I mean...'s not a good location. Right? I mean, on the cliffs here, nothin for miles. They set up here a few months ago. Omar an' Raz tried to shake 'em loose, but, eh...they're tough. Tough bastards. Killed a lotta Slabs before the king gave it up. I-"

"Slabs?" Brick interrupted.

"'s the clan. This clan. Dang, man, you're the new king, and you don't even know that?"

Brick shrugged, a seismic display of nonchalance. "I know it now. You just told me. Anyway, you said there's nothin for miles. Why's Hyperion up our asses, then?"

"Beats me. Maybe they're hiding something. 's pretty remote. If someone wanted to hide a thing, they might put it here."

Brick stepped out of the shadows to get a better look at the Hyperion base in the south. It sloped up and away to the distance, half hidden behind a complex of guard towers and turrets.

"We're gonna pick up where the last king left off," Brick announced.

"But...last time-"

"You didn't have me last time. Though, Rocko tells me that you had him before," Brick said, turning to look back at the bandit.

He was mildly surprised to see the raider take a retreating step. "...Not me. Maybe some of these bastards, though," he said, gesturing around.

The other bandits sniggered or turned away, their expressions hidden behind masks, and for a moment Brick still didn't get it. Then he realized the double meaning of his own words. He'd only meant that the Slabs had Rocko in their clan, once, but the way it came out...

Rocko's hand slipped into Brick's and gave it a quick, comforting squeeze; whether it was to draw reassurance or to give it, Brick didn't know. Either way, it did nothing to calm the sucking pit that opened in his gut at the sound of the Slabs laughter.

He stepped forward. His hand fell again to his pistol, this time closing around the handle, but before he could draw, there came the clap of another gunshot. Bone's forehead was gone, replaced by a dark, gory pit. A bullet had punched through his skull, wiping out his shield and his life with one shot.

"What the hell!" said another bandit, who moved to get up from the barrel he'd been perched on. He was cut down by another shot. It laid him dead across the ground, brains sprayed against the wall behind him.

Pandemonium broke out as the bandits scrabbled up, tried to flee or draw their guns, but were picked off, one by one, with cold, calculated precision.

Rocko came to Brick's side, clutching him with curled, frightened claws and looking around for the assailant. Brick didn't have to search. He'd fought alongside the sharpshooter often enough to gauge his position, and his eyes went straight to the spot where he'd be. Sure enough, he found him atop the armory that had housed the Baby Maker.

It was Mordecai—a tom who's snuck into the junkyard to swipe a bone out from under the old dog's nose—crouched on the roof of the stash, his gaunt figure in sharp relief against the sky. He made no attempt to hide himself from view, and kept his eye to the sniper's scope. Brick could feel the crosshairs on him.

They eyed each other for a long, pregnant moment, before Mordecai lowered the rifle to his side. He held up his other hand, signing something. At first, Brick thought Mordecai was flipping him the bird. He nearly returned the gesture, then realized it wasn't Mordecai's middle finger he held up, but his pinky.  _A promise._

Mordecai turned and vanished over the roof of the armory.

Brick sprinted off without a word to Rocko. There would be time to talk later, but Mordecai was quick, and if he was trying to get away, Brick would have a slim chance to catch him. He lunged across the makeshift bridge, nearly toppling over the side as it pitched under his weight, but made it across and jogged up the ridge.

But when he reached the armory, Mordecai was gone. The stash's entrance was a dark, gaping maw, the electric fence deactivated, and Brick could make out the interior well enough to see that it was picked clean. The shelves had been stripped of the remaining weapons, either by other Slabs or by Mordecai.

He was about to turn away when a glint in the shadows caught his eye. He entered the armory and crossed to the crimson bauble that had attracted his attention, like the single beady eye of a skag. It was a gun, its elemental accessory glowing with faint luminescence. Brick bent and picked up the assault rifle, inspecting it from barrel to stock, and took it into the sun to get a better look.

Mordecai had made good on his word. The Draco had been reconstructed, as good as new.


End file.
